
Class _HliA6TL_ 

Book rPi-l_ 

GopyiightN" 

COPVRIGIIT DEPOSIT. 



TALE LECTURES ON THE 
EESPOK^SIBILITIES OE CITIZENSHIP 



THE CITIZEN m HIS EELATION 

TO THE 

INDUSTKIAL SITUATION 



THE CITIZEN IN HIS 

EELATION TO THE 

INDUSTEIAL SITUATION 

YALE LECTUEES 



BY 

HENRY CODMAN POTTER, D.D., LL.D, 

BISHOP OF NEW YORK 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1902 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Cowefl ReosivED 

OCT. 2d t902 

0<.*«8*^XXft Ho. 

oorv B. 




i'>-":p"^ 



Copyriglit, 1902, by 
Yale University 



PuUished OctoUr, 1902 



• • • ! 

•• • • 

• • • 



THE DEVINNE PRE83 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Industrial Situation 3 

II The Citizen and the Working Man .... 41 

III The Citizen and the Capitalist 83 

IV The Citizen and the Consumer 125 

V The Citizen and the Corporation 165 

VI The Citizen and the State . 206 



SOMEWHAT more than two years ago, Mr. William 
E. Dodge gave to Yale University a fund whose 
objects are conveyed in the accompanying clauses : 

" I desire to make a gift to the University for the 
purpose of promoting among its students and gradu- 
ates, and among the educated men of the United 
States, an understanding of the duties of Christian 
citizenship and a sense of personal responsibility for 
the performance of those duties. 

^^For the furtherance of the purpose in view, it is 
my desire that the income of the fund thus given 
should be paid each year to a lecturer of distinguished 
attainments and high conception of civic responsibili- 
ties 5 who shall deliver a course of lectures on a topic 
whose understanding will contribute to the formation 
of an intelligent public sentiment, of high standards of 
the duty of a Christian citizen, and of habits of action 
to give effect to these sentiments and these standards. 
The lectures thus provided are to be known as the 
Tale Lectures on the Responsibilities of Citizenship.'^ 



THE CITIZEN IN HIS RELATION 

TO THE 

INDUSTEIAL SITUATION 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

THE founder of these lectures recognized, 
with a rare penetration, one of the dan- 
gers of college and university life : the danger 
that learning shall become merely academic. 
I use the word in that sense in which James 
Eussell Lowell uses it when, as some of you 
will remember, he says, in his ^^ Essay on De- 
mocracy": ^^The question is no longer the aca- 
demic one. Is it wise to give every man the 
ballot?" but rather the practical one, ^^Is it 
prudent to deprive whole classes of it any 
longer?" That is to say, it is possible to deal 
with large and grave questions, groups of facts, 
volumes of history, phenomena of science, in 
such a way as to leave all one's learning, so to 
speak, up ''in the air," touching no living in- 
terest, and least of all concerning one's self 
with any personal service. 

It is true that this has not, hitherto, been 

3 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

supposed to be the tendency of our American 
centres of learning. On the contrary, we have 
been a good deal girded at, especially by our 
German brethren, because our scholarship has 
been so little academic and so largely, if not 
exclusively, ^ ' practical " — if not exclusively 
commercial. In other words, we have heard 
it said, abroad if not at home, ' ' You Americans 
care for learning only if you can coin it; for 
knowledge only as you can hitch it to a ma- 
chine, and make it push, pull, roll, weave, or 
build, out of primitive elements, a ship or a 
factory. You cannot even understand, much 
less appreciate, the fine enthusiasm for learn- 
ing for its own sake ; as when one of your phi- 
lologists of much local repute received with 
a shout of laughter the statement of a young 
German professor that, having devoted ten 
years to the study of Greek prepositions, he 
was going to confine himself, for the rest of 
his life, to the study of the Greek particle 
de (SO." 

And undoubtedly there has been, in certain 
directions of study, a good deal of truth in 
this. But it is no less true that, along with such 

4 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

a tendency in our modern, and especially in 
our American life, there survives a very dif- 
ferent tendency which, alas, in the highest 
realms of learning, has been characteristic of 
all ages. For what are the highest realms of 
learning, but those which touch the domain of 
moral principles, and have to do, finally, with 
the building of human character? It would 
be an interesting if melancholy task, if, here, 
1 had time for it, to pursue the history from 
this point of view both of philosophy and of 
theology. Both these have too much concerned 
themselves with the making of systems, and too 
little with the making of men. But it is more 
men that the world wants, not more systems. 
It is character that our modern life waits for, 
to redeem and transform it ; and conduct as the 
fruitage of character. And for this reason it 
was, if I have understood him aright, that the 
author of this foundation created it. He saw, 
as one of clear vision and of high ideals, which 
a chivalric and untiring service for his fellow- 
men has steadfastly illustrated, that to make a 
state or a republic great you must rear in it, 
and for it, men with great ideals not only as 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

scholars, or soldiers, or scientists, bnt as citi- 
zens; and it is to this end that these lectures 
have been, and are to be, devoted. 

I shall confine myself to a single aspect of 
the subject; and so, I venture to think, shall 
best serve the purpose of the founder. A 
citizen is a man rightly concerned, and indi- 
rectly responsible, at any rate, under our form 
of government, for the well-being of the 
civis^—the city, the state, the republic; but we 
cannot turn to ask, ' ' In what is it that that well- 
being consists?'' without being constrained to 
recognize that there are some aspects of it 
which are distinctly and exclusively modern. 
AVhat the citizen was in Athens or in Rome, 
what he owed to the republic or the empire, 
cannot define what he owes here and to-day, 
simply because conditions, then and now, have, 
from almost every point of view, so wholly 
changed. 

From none of them is this more true, than 
from what I may call the industrial point of 
view. A new world has come into being within 
the last century ; and the transformations which 
have been wrought have touched, not alone 
material conditions, agencies, forces, but, as 

6 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

must inevitably be the case where these are 
the products of the mental activity of the race, 
the whole of human society. The ancient 
working man and the modern working man 
are no longer one. The capitalist has come 
to have a new and portentous meaning, of 
which previous ages did not even conceive; 
and the consumer to have both powers and re- 
sponsibilities, if he will recognize them, equally 
large. The corporation, in modern times, and 
the State have developed into relations, po- 
tential, minatory, or beneficent in their possi- 
bilities, of which the elder world never even 
dreamed: in a word, citizenship to-day has 
come to have, in these aspects of it alone, a 
new and wider and more various meaning than 
ever before. 

And so, in consonance, I believe, with the 
purpose and design of this foundation, it is 
my purpose to speak in these lectures of the 
Citizen in his Relation to the Industrial Situa- 
tion, and to those various aspects of it involved 
in the personalities and associations which I 
have already named. 

It will be well for us, however, before under- 
taking to deal with those great questions which 

7 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

in this connection have arisen, to discover, if 
we may, the causes and processes which have 
been influential in creating what may best be 
described as the present situation. The evo- 
lution of human society is one of the most fas- 
cinating studies that can invite the scholar; 
and in no department of critical inquiry is the 
operation of great and inexorable and, on the 
whole, beneficent laws more manifest. Within 
the limits prescribed for me here, any review 
of this evolution must needs be restricted and 
partial ; but, happily, it is a case in which such 
a partial review will sufficiently answer our 
purpose as indicative of a law that has widely 
and persistently operated. And, as furnishing 
to us at the outset a definite point of departure, 
let us recall for a moment the birth of Latin 
civilization. 

The growth of the Roman Empire was a 
growth based upon the development of law and 
of visible authority. Human society in Egypt, 
Greece, and Persia had long before begun to 
advance beyond the patriarchal stage, and to 
gravitate toward the transformation and cen- 
tralization of power into various forms of mon- 
archical government. But it remained for 

8 



TPIE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

Eome to take these various forms of local 
sovereignty and authority, and coordinate and 
consolidate them in the empire. That there 
was here a higher conception of law than that 
which theretofore the civilized world had 
known, the incomparable code of Justinian still 
survives to bear witness. But behind the law 
was the army; and the army— the Eoman 
centurion and his like— was, to the average 
mind of that era of the world's history, the 
visible expression of its organized life, and of 
the final law of its being. What, however, did 
the army stand for but, supremely, the idea of 
discipline; and what in turn did discipline 
stand for but that a man's lot in life was fixed, 
and that, in the exercise of his individual fac- 
ulties and powers, he was himself to be con- 
tented with the conditions into which he was 
born, and the tasks to which he was set. Slave 
or sovereign, priest or peasant, he was, after 
all, simply part of a vast system which assigned 
to him his task, defined its limits, and deter- 
mined its rewards.^ Might was ^4n the sad- 
dle," and men were governed by the will of 
the strongest. The king, the priest, the master, 

1 " Introduction to Social Philosophy," J. S. Mackenzie, p. 74. 

9 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

was firmly established at the top : the serf, the 
peasant, the apprentice, was firmly fastened 
at the bottom. It was, to nse one of Carlyle's 
expressive phrases, the ^^ brass collar period."^ 
How odious such a phrase sounds to a mod- 
ern ear! And yet it needs only a little reflec- 
tion to remind us that it may easily have stood 
for an age of considerable privilege and hap- 
piness. For it must always be remembered, 
when we are comparing such times with our 
own, that servitude, in whatever form, whether 
military, ecclesiastical, or civil, brought with 
it considerable immunities, back toward which, 
in freer ages, people of larger freedoms and 
more absolute personal liberty might easily 
look with longing and regret. Neither the serf 
nor the soldier had any least concern about 
his daily bread. That, the order under which 
each toiled or served was bound, of necessity, 
to provide. As little was either concerned for 
his physical protection and well-being. To 
care for that, every selfish interest, if not any 
humane instinct, pledged those whose safety 
and prosperity rested, finally, very largely on 
the soldiers' or the serfs' efficient service. 

iCarlyle, ''Past and Present." 
10 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

They were free from care for the present or 
anxiety for the future; and it is doubtful 
whether the average of human happiness 
among them was not often as high as, if not 
sometimes higher than, that of the average life 
of the toiler or artisan in the foul and over- 
crowded homes of the poor in our great cities 
to-day. The uncertainties of the wage-earner; 
the fierce strife for bread of the modern miner 
or agricultural laborer,— these were miseries 
out of which what we call militarism, whether 
in the state or in the church,— and its spirit 
existed with equal absolutism in both,— sub- 
stantially delivered those who for centuries 
so widely, if not always contentedly, rested 
under it. 

Not always contentedly, however; for the 
time came, as inevitably it was destined to 
come, when the age of authority paled and 
waned before the dawn of that era which his- 
torians have described by many names; as- 
signed, so far as its organic beginnings were 
concerned, to more than one period in the 
progress of civilization; and accounted for 
sometimes by opposite if not contradictory 
forces. It is enough for our purpose to remind 

11 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ourselves that the time came when the slave no 
longer rested content with being a slave; and 
when the declaration of Rousseau that ^^man 
is born free, and yet everywhere is in chains" 
had its various foreshadowings in the strife of 
his barons with King John ; in the dawn of that 
great intellectual movement known as the 
Eenaissance; and in the beginnings of that 
age of criticism when captains and kings 
^^and everything that claimed authority 
over men had to be weighed in the balance of 
human reason— with a certain a priori 
conviction that they were sure to be found 
wanting. ' ' ^ 

Now at this point it may be asked what has 
all this to do with the questions which we are 
considering here,— those questions, I mean, of 
economic adjustment which you and I believe 
to be fundamental to the obligations of the 
citizen and to the constitution or the recon- 
stitution of our social order. A moment or two 
of reflection will, I think, make this clear to us. 
What was it which followed from the decay of 
the age of militarism, and the dawn of the age 
of criticism? Plainly this; that, as corporate 

1 " Introduction to Social Philosophy," J. S. Mackenzie^ p. 74. 

12 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

authority declined in power, the intelligence 
and will and energy of the individual roused 
themselves to take its place. The student of 
mediaeval history will remember the phrase 
^^One God, one Pope, one Emperor." Hegel, 
in his ' ' Philosophy of History, ' ' has shown us 
how vain an ideal it was ; but its impotence was 
not disclosed until the dawn of the Reforma- 
tion. With the more distinctly religious as- 
pect of that great movement we are not now 
called upon to concern ourselves. That which 
is germane to this discussion is that view of it 
in which it stands revealed as the disclosure 
of a new social force. The right of private 
judgment involved, of necessity, more than the 
right to judge in religious matters. Inevitably 
there went with it the right to judge in political 
and social matters. In a word, the spectre of 
authority, august, imposing, hitherto constrain- 
ing and terrifying, faded before the dawn of 
a day when men looked their fellow-men reso- 
lutely in the face; claimed their freedom not 
alone to think, but to choose and to act ; broke 
away from the old subordinations in which they 
had been so long held in subjection; asserted 
their right to shape their own lives, to choose 

13 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

their own callings ; to combine upon their own 
terms;— and a new age was born! 

And thus we are brought to the threshold 
of that era which is distinctively our own, and 
which may be called the industrial era. First 
the era of militarism; then the era of freedom; 
and then, as some think, by a strange paradox, 
arising out of it, the age in which you and I 
are living, and which many men think is least 
of all an age of freedom. And yet the steps 
by which it has been reached are intelligible, 
and were inevitable. Out of the older and 
more benumbing order of a society in which 
each individual was held fast to the caste, the 
trade, the calling to which he had been born, 
there arose an age in which freedom gave at 
last to the individual his best chance. The 
lowliest might, if he would and could, climb 
to the place of the highest. The barber 's ap- 
prentice in Engla^d, seated at last upon the 
Woolsack and dispensing law for an empire, 
became the type and image of what any man 
with equal gifts and courage and industry 
might achieve. There were no longer any J&xed 
and impenetrable ranks and classes. 

Do you not see what inevitably came out of 

14 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

it? If you and I are no longer to be held in 
bondage to a chief, a lordj a sovereign, then 
not only are we free to choose our own callings 
in life, bnt to choose the same callings, and to 
strive, side by side, for superiority or success 
in them. And the wider the opportunities, the 
richer the rewards, the more numerous the con- 
testants, the fiercer the strife becomes, and so 
you have the age of competition. In commerce, 
in manufactures, in the mechanic arts, nothing 
is more dramatic than the history of this uni- 
versal rivalry. The two American clipper 
ships racing, fifty years ago, from China across 
the Pacific to see which should first land their 
cargoes in the harbor of New York, are a pic- 
ture of all the rest. The inventions of one 
mechanical genius are quickly eclipsed by 
those of another ; and the tool of yesterday, so 
clever, so original, and so indispensable yes- 
terday, is made swiftly worthless by the inven- 
tion of to-day. 

Your minds must surely have outrun my 
own in anticipating what has been the next 
great step in the history of our social progress 
—or social decadence, as some have been dis- 
posed to call it. For, no sooner had the world's 

15 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

v^'Orkmen won their freedom than they have 
seemed, to many thoughtful observers, in dan- 
ger of losing it. There is a curious significance 
just here in the relation of one single discov- 
ery or movement to the whole situation,— I 
mean the invention of printing. The dawn 
of the Reformation— of the great era of 
intellectual and moral freedom— was coinci- 
dent, substantially, with the age and achieve- 
ment of Gutenberg. In a night, as it were, it 
became possible almost indefinitely to widen 
the area of the world's knowledge by the 
agency of a single invention, the printing- 
press. But the printing-press, after all, was a 
machine, not a man; and as machinery went 
on becoming more complex, more competent, 
I had almost said more omnipotent, the indi- 
vidual sank, increasingly, in significance and 
value. And all the while, the grasp of com- 
merce and the industrial arts grew wider and 
more omnivorous; and the fierce struggle to 
meet the growing demands of huge competitive 
industries more remorseless and exacting. It 
was inevitable that such a warfare should pro- 
duce its present results. The limitations of 
individual capital, the uncertainties of indi- 

16 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

vidual enterprise, the enormous wastefulness 
of unregulated competitions, crippled, dis- 
heartened, and, oftener than otherwise, impov- 
erished those who engaged in them. And then, 
naturally and obviously, there dawned the era, 
first of combinations of capital, and then of 
combinations of labor. Whichever preceded the 
other,— and it is not necessary to our purpose 
here to answer that question,— one simply could 
not be without the other. If capitalists com- 
bined to economize the cost of production, the 
laborer must combine to protect himself against 
such applications of that economy as, to him, 
would be remorseless or fatal. Especially was 
this the case as the progress of the mechanic 
arts tended more and more toward the speciali- 
zation of labor. It mattered little, compara- 
tively, to a workman, when he was, e.g.j a me- 
chanic making a whole thing, whether he found 
employment in the manufacture of that particu- 
lar thing or of something else; for the know- 
ledge and aptitudes which he had acquired in 
mastering his particular craft or art, even 
though directed ordinarily toward the making 
of a single thing, had given him deftness and 
facility sufficient to enable him to turn his in- 

17 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

dustrial activity in half a dozen different direc- 
tions. But as machinery went on usurping, 
one after another, the various earlier handi- 
crafts, the relation of the individual workman 
came to be at once increasingly narrow and 
mechanicalized. Imagine the contrast between 
Quintin Matsys at Antwerp, forging and mould- 
ing and hammering out the exquisite construc- 
tions in wrought iron that some of us have seen 
in the old world ; and a modern workman whose 
solitary task in some huge establishment from 
morning till night, day in and day out, consists 
in turning a single strip of iron back and forth 
as he presses it between a mammoth pair of 
shears ! What is such a man worth when, dis- 
missed from such a task, he is bidden to find 
another— having, it may be, no slightest resem- 
blance to it— or starve? The only alternative 
for such a wretched being— and it belongs to 
you and me to remember that there are millions 
of them— is in some such form of industrial 
combination as shall bind together him and his 
fellow-worlmien in a common fellowship for 
mutual protection. 

Now, it is with the consequence of such a 
situation that you and I, and especially those 

18 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

of us who by our calling and office stand for 
those forces and influences which are ordained 
to be the mightiest and most beneficent in 
human affairs, are directly concerned. The 
first and most grave consequence of such a 
condition of our social forces as I have indi- 
cated is its tendency toward mutual alienation. 
It is almost impossible for people of our own 
era to conceive of those social conditions which 
our own much- vaunted civilization has dis- 
placed. It is undoubtedly true that the indi- 
vidual, in those classes and callings which are 
at the bottom of the social scale, has to-day 
much more of a certain kind of freedom; but 
it is scarcely less certain that he has much less, 
so far as those above him are concerned, of any 
kind of personal consideration. The ages, 
military, mediaeval, whatever they were that 
succeeded the patriarchal ages, dismissed out 
of their common life a great deal that was 
primitive and elementary; but there survived 
features of the earlier family life which to 
have lost, as we have certainly and I fear ir- 
reparably lost them, is to have sustained a 
deprivation, I had almost said depravation, 
which is incalculable. When the serf and the 

19 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

master, the apprentice and his employer, the 
clerk and the shopkeeper, slept nnder the same 
roof; ate, often, at the same table; and daily 
touched each other's lives in countless ways, 
it was inevitable that there should have existed 
not only a community of interests, but a com- 
munity of interest^ of sympathy, of mutual un- 
derstanding and appreciation, which the mod- 
ern conditions of labor and its employment 
have banished utterly. There were trades- 
unions, then: the mediaeval guilds were simply 
trades-unions under a different name ; ^ but 
they were trades-unions of a wider scope, be- 
cause master and workman were organized in 
the same union with a common interest, not in 
hostile unions with conflicting interests. 

And out of this have issued, by the working 
of an inexorable law, the elements of a still 
graver situation. It is not alone that the work- 
man in a particular mill or mine or factory 
has come, frequently, to stand in antagonistic 
relations to his own employer, or to that huge 
officialism that contracts with him,— for too 
often it is the case that there is no individual 

^See, passim, " Trade s-TJti ionium, New and Old/' 
George Howells. 

20 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

employer, but only some salaried functionary 
who holds his place and draws his pay only so 
long as he rules with a stiff hand and holds a 
tight rein,— out of our present situation it has 
come about that there has been begotten a sul- 
len class hatred which is quite as acute here 
in our own republic as under the most despotic 
forms of government; and whose menace 
threatens not only the relations which bind 
together certain industrial interests, but the 
whole social fabric. Many of us are so far 
from the literature of this particular mental 
attitude that we are largely ignorant of its 
animus; but the very latest socialistic organi- 
zation of which I have seen an authentic re- 
port, holding its meeting in the chief city of the 
country, and having under consideration the 
questions of an enunciation of principles and 
the choice of fit candidates for office, declares 
itself equally indifferent to either of them, and 
affirms that it has but one aim and object before 
it, and that, that which is expressed in the 
battle-cry ' ' Down with Capital ! " ^ 

That such is the animus, at any rate, of mod- 

1 Declaration made at a socialistic meeting in 
New York in July, 1901. 

21 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ern socialism only those who have not taken 
the trouble to follow its history can be ignorant. 
Not original here, in its organized form, it has 
reproduced on this side of the Atlantic the 
most radical and destructive principles of those 
who were its founders and disciples on the 
other. Undoubtedly the crude and vague 
terms ^^ socialism'' and ^^ socialist" need defi- 
nition; and a fundamental qualification, as I 
shall presently indicate more in detail, is im- 
plied in the terms ^^ Christian socialist" and 
^'Christian socialism," which are claimed and 
used by men of devout character and the high- 
est aims. But, in its broader sense, the secular 
socialism of the old world and the new are 
one. There could not well be any more precise 
definition of its principles than the familiar 
formula, long used by its disciples to define its 
objects, ^^the collective ownership and control 
of the means of production, distribution, and 
exchange." So far as the matter of any con- 
nection with anarchism is concerned, the rela- 
tion of the modern socialistic movement must 
in all probability remain a disputed question. 
No efforts to condemn anarchistic methods in 
socialistic assemblages have met with marked 

22 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

success, while, on the other hand. Dr. and Mrs. 
Aveling, leading socialistic authorities, have 
declared that ^^ well-nigh every word spoken 
by the chief defendants of the Chicago trial of 
Parsons could be endorsed by socialists, for 
they preached not anarchism but socialism. 
Indeed, he that will compare, they say, the fine 
speech of Parsons (the anarchist) in 1886, with 
that of Liebknecht at the high-treason trial at 
Leipzig, will find the two practically identi- 
cal. " ^ '' Communist anarchists, ' ^ says Mr. 
Geoffrey Drage, whose most able work on the 
^^ Labor Problem" I would commend to the at- 
tention of every serious student of social and 
economic questions, — ' ' communist anarchists 
adhere to the economic doctrines taught by 
Karl Marx, and maintain that human progress 
lies in the direction of the ^socialization of 
wealth and integrated labor. ' ' ' They, like the 
revolutionary socialists, are most bitter in their 
attacks on the present system of society, though 
when the former at times justify the ^^propa- 
ganda of deed," the socialists are inclined to 
draw the line at the ^^ propaganda of word." 



1 *'The Working Class Movement in America, •' Edward 
and Eleanor Marx- Aveling. 

23 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

In an article on ^'Anarchism and Outrage," 
reprinted from the anarchist journal ^^ Free- 
dom," anarchists are referred to as ^'propa- 
gandists of socialism who will have none of 
parliamentary elections." Anarchists of this 
type are also at one with the socialists in their 
demand for common ownership of property 
and a system of common production, but they 
are more socialistic than the socialists in that 
they maintain that a system of common pro- 
duction must, of necessity, lead to a system of 
common consumption. ''Apart from the ques- 
tion of a future government, anarchism, ' ' says 
Mr. E. Belford Bax, in the "Religion of Social- 
ism, " " may be said to be but an extremer phase 
of socialism." A further similarity can be 
traced between the views with regard to human 
nature which underlie both the socialistic and 
anarchistic theories. Whether explicitly or 
only implicitly, the socialists appear to hold 
that the development of character is dependent 
mainly on external circumstances. In the 
preface to his "Religion of Socialism" Bel- 
ford Bax states: "The bourgeois moralist is 
never tired of preaching the reform of the in- 
dividual character as the first condition of 

24 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

human happiness, ignoring the fact that science 
knows of no such thing as an individual char- 
acter, apart from social surroundings. He 
holds fast to the old fallacious standpoint, ac- 
cording to which individual good men make 
healthy social conditions, rather than acknow- 
ledge the truth that it is healthy social condi- 
tions that make good men."^ 

There could not, on the whole, be a more in- 
telligible and explicit definition of socialism 
than this, and it ought not to be surprising 
therefore that it has so often passed on into 
those extremer forms of a godless atheism to 
which I have already referred. ^^It behooves 
us,'^ says one of their recent exponents, ^Ho 
redouble, then, our efforts to free the world 
not only from the superstition of capitalism and 
authority, but also from the superstition of re- 
ligion and a belief in God. For man will never 
be free until he has rid his mind of this God- 
idea, the invention of the lying priests. So- 
cialism, in the future, must go forward side by 
side with atheism, for the socialism which is 
not atheistic is inconsistent and illogical." 
Bakounin, in his work ^^God and the State, '^ 

1 ''The Labor Problem," Geoffrey Drage, pp. 348-349. 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

has laid down the law with such clearness that 
there is no possible evasion of the issue for 
those who are truly socialists. ^^The idea of 
God implies the abdication of human reason 
and justice : it is the most decisive negation of 
human liberty, and necessarily ends in the en- 
slavement of all mankind. ... If God is, man 
is a slave ; now man can and must be free ; then 
God does not exist. I defy any one whomso- 
ever, says this author, to avoid this circle ; now, 
therefore, let all choose. ^'^ 

I do not need to remind those to whom I am 
speaking that there is a very different kind 
of socialism, having indeed, substantially, the 
same ends in view, but resting its endeavors 
upon a very different basis, and inspired by a 
very different spirit. If the modem socialist 
movement rose with Kobert Owen in 1817, 
^^when Owen laid his scheme for the establish- 
ment of a socialistic community before a par- 
liamentary committee appointed to enquire 
into the poor law, " ^ it owed its greatest im- 
pulse to the labors of such men as Frederick 
Dennison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Thomas 

1 Letter in the '^Commonweal/' Sept. 30, 1893. 
2 '* The Labor Problem," Appendix I. 

26 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

Hughes, Ludlow, Vansittart, Neale, and their 
like, who touched a dark and perplexing 
problem with the transforming word of Chris- 
tian self-sacrifice. The best in some of our 
more modern teachers, Robertson, Bushnell, 
Westcott, and their like, who brought to the 
miseries, the maladjustments, the socio-indus- 
trial hardships and injustices of our modern 
life, a vision so clear, a touch so tender, and a 
scrutiny so patient and penetrating, that, step 
by step, up out of the caverns of despair in 
which some of the horrors of our nineteenth- 
century industrialism had plunged them, mul- 
titudes of all but despairing souls climbed up- 
ward toward the light, came from these great 
teachers ! 

And the reason for this was that these men 
and those who came after them turned upon 
the perplexing problems of our social disorders 
the light of a divine life. For centuries the 
church had been getting farther and farther 
away from the people, understanding them 
less, seeing them less, loving them less. For 
well-nigh a thousand years religion stood in 
the popular mind only for a colossal and por- 
tentous menace on the one hand, and for a 

27 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

splendid ceremonial and a grasping company 
of official ceremonialists on the other. And 
then at last, the Bible, with its strange and un- 
familiar message, broke on the ears of the peo- 
ple, and slowly filtered down into the popular 
consciousness, as the revelation of a new and 
divine social order, here and to-day. 

There are still ecclesiastics, even among our- 
selves, who do not believe anything of the sort. 
There are still devout men, and they in holy 
orders, who believe that my presence here, and 
yours as listeners to anything that I may say, 
is a grave misuse, if not a dangerous perver- 
sion, of spiritual office and function. There 
are still men and women, everywhere, who call 
themselves religious, who do not hesitate to 
maintain that religion has nothing whatever 
to do with the social conditions of human life, 
unless it be to teach men to look forward to an 
existence when they and their fellows shall be 
delivered from them; and, meanwhile, to cul- 
tivate such patience and resignation as they 
may. And since this is so you and I must first 
of all be able, in the face of all that confronts 
us in these problems, social, economic, and in- 
dustrial, to show that religion has some warrant 

28 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

for being concerned with them, and that, in the 
great task of their solution, we may not, must 
not, withhold onr hands. To what, now, does 
such a challenge send us if not to the feet of 
Jesus Christ? He is our Master, and we are 
His pupils. Has He spoken on these ques- 
tions ? Does the story of His life and teaching 
give us any warrant for concerning ourselves 
with them? He came to be the founder of a 
new religion: does it give us laws and prin- 
ciples for this world and life, or only for an- 
other? To these questions there are, I submit, 
explicit and definite answers; not always, it 
may be, in the form of precepts, but always and 
everywhere, from the beginning to the end of 
the earthly ministry of Jesus, by the illustra- 
tion or enunciation of infallible and univer- 
sally applicable principles, which he who runs 
ma}^ read, and which touch the whole circum- 
ference of man's daily life. I would not for- 
get, just here, and I would not have others 
forget, that wise caution of a discerning 
teacher of our own time ^ who has reminded us 
that ^^ Nothing is easier for the brain fertile 

i Professor Shailer Matthews, ^'The Social 
Teaching of Jesus," p. 7 et seq, 

29 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

in generalities, and for the heart burning with 
sympathy and indignation, than to evolve a 
system from a sentence or a term. In this par- 
ticular, Christian Sociology is re-running the 
career of Christian Theology. As the dog- 
matic theologian has, too often, made a system 
of philosophy masquerade as a theology by 
dressing it out with a series of more or less 
well-fitting proof-texts, so, too often, modern 
prophets to a degenerate church, in sublime 
indifference to the context, time of authorship, 
and purpose of a New Testament book, and 
with an equal neglect of the personal peculi- 
arity and vocabulary of a New Testament 
writer, have set forth, as the word of Chris- 
tianity, views which are but bescriptured social 
denunciation and vehemence. But, on the 
other hand, it is no less to be remembered that 
the student of Occidental civilization who dis- 
regards the teachings of Jesus is as unscientific 
as he who, in the history of philosophy, should 
neglect Plato or Kant; or, in the history of 
the United States, should disregard the Consti- 
tution. No man's teaching has equalled His 
in the magnitude of its social results."^ 

1 Ibid., p. 9. 
30 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

"What was His teacliing? Is it true that it 
had relation only to another world, and to the 
conditions on which men were to reach it? Is 
it true that He came to tell men to despair of 
humanity, of society, of the life that now is, 
and the tasks that are, and the triumphs that 
may be, here? Then, certainly, when His dis- 
ciples went to Him saying, ^^Lord, teach us 
how to pray," He taught them after a most 
misleading fashion. For what He taught them 
Avas this : Our Father, who art in heaven, Hal- 
lowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy 
ivill be done on earthy As it is in heaven. Do 
you grasp the wide reach, the large mean- 
ing, the explicit foreshadowing, of these words ? 
^^Our Father"— then the relation binding men 
to God was a filial relation, and the re- 
lation of men to one another was a fra- 
ternal relation; for it is at your peril that 
you change the first word of the prayer to 
'^my Father." ^'Thy kingdom come. Thy 
will be done on earth, As it is in heaven.^ ^ 
Then the kingdom of God is not a super- 
nal realization in some distant realm or 
stage of being, but one which has its place 
in this realm and on our stage of being. 

31 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

On the earth as it is done in heaven cannot 
mean that the kingdom of God is an unrealiza- 
ble thing for humanity in this world, and with 
our ennobled powers and faculties, or else the 
words that bid us pray for it are a grotesque 
and monstrous mockery. And so, at the very 
outset of an inquiry as to the social teaching 
of Jesus Christ, we discover that He came with 
a message to man as he ^5,— nay, to men as they 
are,— in their solitary personalities, first of 
all, but no less surely in those complex rela- 
tions which they bore, and bear, to one another 
as parents and children, teachers and pupils, 
masters and servants, hirer and hired; and so 
on, all through the various realms of life. 

And all this is made overwhelmingly plain 
not only by Christ's teachings but by His life. 
Not alone do sermon and parable alike draw 
their imagery from the homeliest aspects of 
daily life, the sower and the reaper in the field, 
the steward of an estate, the laborers in the 
vineyard, the traveller by the wayside : but His 
own steps moved close all the while to these 
things ; never separating or isolating Him from 
them; touched by, and touching, the lowliest 
humanity, all along, and forever emphasizing 

32 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

the fact that the Fatherhood of God had no 
meaning as a principle of action unless it issued 
forever in the service and sacrifice that affirm 
the brotherhood of man. 

This, then, is the message, these are the 
truths, with which we are charged. If they 
are not a part of the religion of Jesus Christ, 
then, verily. His religion has somehow become 
something else than He revealed, or His life 
and death proclaimed. And that— is it not 
time that we owned it frankly?— is the shame, 
too often, of its history among men. It is but 
a little while after their Master had ascended 
into heaven that we see the followers and suc- 
cessors of those whom He left to plant His 
truth among men, borrowing from the most 
powerful, but, alas! the most corrupt, empire 
that was contemporaneous with its birth, every 
note of splendor, every fierce lust of power, 
every implacable animosity toward those who 
challenged its authority, which had distin- 
guished and disfigured the history of the 
empire that it supplanted. The world-spirit 
speedily came to be too strong for the Christ- 
spirit; and the divine society which Jesus 
Christ instituted, wherewith to efface the harsh 

33 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

and rigid distinctions that had divided men, 
was made the instrument of reviving and em- 
phasizing those distinctions. True it is that 
that great spiritual uprising in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries to which I have al- 
ready referred, found its beginnings in a wide 
and gracious return to primitive simplicity, 
and to the great doctrine of the common broth- 
erhood of man; but secular forces since then, 
and, more than all, the secular spirit in those 
who claimed to have been raised above it, have 
too often renounced and disowned that one- 
ness in Christian kinship and interest which 
they still loudly professed. 

It is in such facts to-day, believe me, that are 
the chief obstacles to the progress of the king- 
dom of God in the world. That they who pro- 
fess to be the disciples of that kingdom and 
the followers of the carpenter of Nazareth do 
not honestly accept His teaching, and have no 
serious purpose even to attempt to live His 
life,— this is a conviction which, however mis- 
taken, is by great multitudes of people honestly 
held and widely shared. If it be so, the question 
which challenges us to-day is one which cannot 
be evaded or postponed. What we ought to 

34 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

do, and what we can do, to disabuse embittered 
minds, and to win and enlighten those others 
who, to-day, are only ignorant or apathetic, is 
the most pressing demand upon clergy and 
laity alike. I sympathize with those among ns 
who, in such an emergency as this, are repelled 
by the extravagance of religious teachers who, 
having cast in their lot with the advocates of 
social reform, have accepted social theories as 
the basis of a regeneration of society which 
in truth but exchange one set of errors for an- 
other. ' ' The main plank in the platform of the 
Christian socialist'^ says a recent apostle^ 
of what may not unjustly be described as a 
^^ decorated communism,'' "the chief political 
reform at which he aims, being bound by his 
creed to go to the very heart of the matter, to 
be content with no tinkering, is the restoration 
of the land to the people. We Christian so- 
cialists maintain that this is the most far-reach- 
ing reform; that it is demanded by justice; 
and not only that it can be carried out in con- 
sistence with the highest morality, but that mo- 
rality is impossible without it.'' It is the 
sweeping character of statements such as these 

1 The Rev. Stewart Hedlam. 
35 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

which have had quite as much to do with 
holding back any effective movement toward 
the betterment of onr modern social conditions 
as any greed, or apathy, or unscrupulous com- 
binations on the part of those who, in this whole 
business, most need to be won and persuaded. 
It cannot be denied that in their indignation 
in the face of conditions often cruel and de- 
grading, and which involve in their misery 
large masses of their fellow-men, not a few 
earnest minds, and of these especially many 
ministers of Christ's religion, have not only 
hastened to social conclusions which have at 
once betrayed their large ignorance of eco- 
nomic facts and of fundamental ethical princi- 
ples, but have also lent themselves to a propa- 
gandism of half-truths and a reckless employ- 
ment of destructive or disorderly measures that . 
are alike violations of essential equity and de- 
nials of the mind of Christ. From these icono- 
clasts of an existing order, and these destroy- 
ers of the social fabric, we turn in vain to Jesus 
to find for their acts, in any single word or deed 
of His, either vindication or excuse. 

And therefore your duty and mine, in a situ- 
ation such as this, is a very plain one. 

36 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

Tlie questions which to-day challenge the 
attention of all thoughtful people as those with 
which the future of the church, the family, and 
the republic are bound up, are, first of all, 
moral and not at all alone economic, or indus- 
trial, or scientific questions. As such, the citi- 
zen has a clear duty with regard to them which 
cannot be evaded or refused, and that duty is, 
first of all, to understand them. Next to the 
danger of apathy in great moral questions is 
the danger of mere emotionalism, sentimental- 
ism, sensationalism,— passions often awakened 
with an awakening sense of injustice, cruelty, 
indifference, or greed. And these are the im- 
pulses to which much of our modern agitation 
in connection with socio-economic questions is 
apt to appeal. It is because of these that ear- 
nest and high-purposed men who have felt 
themselves constrained to respond to appeals 
made to them in His Name, have too often for- 
gotten that He came to be the founder of a 
kingdom which should be based upon the 
truth,— not a fragment of it, a one-sided view 
of it, a perverted exaggeration of it, but the 
whole of it ; and that, since this is so, and since 
in a cardid recognition of it there is the only 

37 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

hope of unifying tlie warring forces of tMs 
world, and bringing them into subjection to the 
mind that was and is in Him, injustice to the 
rich, or the powerful, or the most favored, is as 
fatal to the progress of that truth as injustice to 
the poor or the least favored; and that there- 
fore denunciations of wealth or rank, or per- 
sonal or social inequalities, are as remote from 
His teachings as denunciations of poverty or 
lowliness or ignorance. Christ did not denounce 
wealth any more than He denounced pauper- 
ism. He did not abhor money: He used it. 
He did not abhor the company of rich men : He 
sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even 
resent a certain profuseness of expenditure. 
With a fine discrimination. He, while habitu- 
ally discouraging it, yet recognized that, here 
and there, there was a place for it. What He 
denounced was the love of wealth ; the lust of 
riches; the vulgar snobbishness that chose ex- 
clusively the fellowship or the ways of rich 
men; the habit of extravagance; in one word, 
greed and luxury and self-indulgence. He 
taught men, first of all, and last of all, that they 
were stewards ; that in the final analysis of men 
and things neither they nor theirs were their 

38 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

own. He frankly recognized and freely util- 
ized the eternal fact— not to be altered or ef- 
faced by culture, by socio-economic legislation, 
or by bombastic pronunciamento— that all men 
are not born ^^free and equal,'' that there are 
diversities of gifts, of talents, of opportunities, 
and that so long as our human society exists, 
these will exist with it. But He no sooner rec- 
ognized this than He disclosed the office of His 
religion with reference to it. That was not 
to exaggerate or emphasize these inequalities, 
but to minimize them ; to introduce into human 
society, in one word, ^^that great principle of 
brotherhood, in and through a divine Father- 
hood, which should take from them their sting, 
and transform them, always and everywhere, 
into divinest opportunities for divinest service 
and sacrifice." 

And here, therefore, is to-day the calling of 
the citizen who recognizes moral obligations as 
the basis of all good citizenship. Over against 
that rising tide of passionate exaggeration, of 
sometimes not very scrupulous self-seeking, as 
incarnated in the politician, the selfish and sen- 
sational labor leader on the one hand, and on 
the other, the employer, the capitalist, the en- 

39 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

trepreneur, which, by many disappointments 
in dealing with labor organizations has been 
hardened into a dull and embittered obstinacy 
and animosity against the whole brood of 
unions and agitators, they must stand who 
would do justly and love mercy, and work 
righteously for their fellow-men, as the true 
disciples of civic duty, first seeking to under- 
stand the large problems with which they are 
called to deal ; and then to illustrate the princi- 
ples which can alone effect their solution. 
' ' Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, 
saith the Lord," might wisely be written over 
the door of every bank, every factory, every 
labor hall, and every mine, in this land. The 
failure of schemes of mere coercion, whether 
on the one hand or the other, whether by the 
organizations of capital or the organizations 
of labor, is the ever recurring lesson of our 
modern life. 

There is another and a better way. Be it 
ours to strive to learn it. And that we may 
help one another to do so, I shall, God willing, 
speak hereafter of the relations and duties of 
the citizen as Working Man, As Capitalist, As a 
Consumer, In the Corporation and in the State. 

40 



II 

THE CITIZEN AND THE WORKING MAN 

THE aim of these lectures, as I have already 
endeavored to make plain, is, if I may, to 
enlarge a little the horizon of our conception of 
citizenship. It is easy to limit this; and still 
easier, I apprehend, to localize it. There is, in 
other words, what perhaps I may venture to 
call a Judaic tendency in the human mind to 
limit our responsibilities to our own class, our 
own town, our own race or religion. And it 
ought to be the office of the university to cor- 
rect this; and, in connection, e.g., with such a 
matter as the definition of the modern respon- 
sibilities of citizenship, to indicate, if no more, 
those wider relations which to-day exist, and 
which cannot exist without bringing responsi- 
bilities with them. One of these, especially in 
the case of the scholar, whose tendency always 
is to be a little too much withdrawn from his 

41 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

fellow-men, is the relation of the citizen to the 
working man. But in advancing in this dis- 
cussion to the question of these relations and 
to the status and environment, as created by 
our modern social conditions, of the working 
man, I am not unmindful of the fact that, by 
many persons, the designation of any particu- 
lar class by such a term is regarded as at once 
misleading and infelicitous. It is urged by 
these that, as a matter of fact, the vast propor- 
tion of the people of any state or community 
belong to the working classes; and that the 
enormous enlargement, both of the sphere and 
the variety of the occujjations alike of men and 
women make it at once superficial and unjustly 
discriminating to speak of any particular group 
of persons as distinctively working men or 
women. 

There is, of course, a certain truth in this of 
which I would by no means wish to lose sight. 
A working man or woman is one who works; 
and this or that person who breaks stone, or 
lays brick, or rolls iron, or does any other 
manual labor, is certainly not the only person 
who works. Much the largest part in its 
dynamic efficiency, and much the most valuable 

42 



THE WORKING MAN 

part in the ultimate productiveness of the 
world's work, is done by men who never 
wielded a pick nor drove a nail. And between 
the two extremes of our complex social organ- 
isms—between, in other words, the capitalist 
who plans, the inventor who contrives, the ex- 
ecutive who sets in motion, on the one hand, 
and the mill hand or miner or trackman who 
toils and delves, on the other,— there is a vast 
army of men and women who form, perhaps, 
the majority in our modern social and eco- 
nomic structure, who are neither in the one 
class nor in the other of these ; and yet, whose 
daily toil, if measured by its hours of various 
labor, whether of the hand or of the brain, is 
quite as arduous as cither's. 

But when this is admitted, as it certainly 
ought to be, the fact still remains that when we 
speak of work and the working man, or of labor 
and the laboring man, there is, ordinarily, at- 
tached to the words a meaning at once explicit 
and circumscribed. ^^ Economic writers, like 
the world in general, do indeed recognize,'' 
says Mr. Mallock,^ ^4n an unscientific way, that 
productive exertion exhibits itself under many 

1 "Labor and the Popular Welfare,'' W. H. Mallock, p. 14. 

43 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

various forms ; but their admissions and state- 
ments with regard to this point are entirely 
confused and stultified by the almost ludicrous 
persistence with which they classify all these 
various forms under the single heading of 
Labor. John Stuart Mill, for instance, says 
that a large part of profits are really wages of 
the labor of superintendence. He speaks of 
Hhe labor of the invention of industrial pro- 
cesses/ 'the labor of Watt in contriving the 
steam-engine,' and even of ^the labor of the 
savant and the speculative thinker.' He em- 
ploys the same word to describe the effort 
that invented Arkwright's spinning- frame and 
the commonest muscular movement of any of 
the mechanics who assisted with hammer or 
screw-driver to construct it under Arkwright's 
direction. He employs the same word to de- 
scribe the power that perfected the electric 
telegraph, and the power that stretches the 
wires from pole to pole like clothes-lines. He 
confuses under one heading the functions of 
the employer and the employed,— of the men 
who lead in industry and the men who follow. 
He calls them all laborers, and he calls their 
work labor. 

44 



THE WORKING MAN 

^^NoWj were the question merely one of lit- 
erary or philosophical propriety, this inclusive 
use of the word labor might be defensible ; but 
we have nothing to do here with the niceties 
of such trivial criticism. We are concerned 
not with what a word might be made to mean, 
but with what practically it does mean ; and if 
we appeal to the ordinary use of language, — 
not only its use by the ordinary mass of men, 
but its most frequent use by economic writers, 
also,— we shall find that the word labor has a 
meaning which is practically settled; and we 
shall find that this meaning is not an inclusive 
one, but exclusive. We shall find that labor 
means, practically, muscular labor, or, at all 
events, some form of exertion of which men — 
common men— are universally capable; and 
that it not only never naturally includes any 
other idea, but distinctly and emphatically ex- 
cludes it. For instance, when Mill, in his 
^Principles of Political Economy,' devotes 
one of his chapters to the future of the ^La- 
boring Classes' he instinctively uses the word 
as meaning manual laborers. When, as not 
unfrequently happens, some opulent politician 
says to a popular audience, ^I, too, am a labor- 

45 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ing man,' he is either understood to be saying 
something which is only true metaphorically, 
or is jeered at as saying something which is 
not true at all. The Wattses, the Stevensons, 
the Wentworths, the Bessemers, the Arm- 
strongs, the Brasseys, are, according to the 
formal definitions of the economists, one and 
all of them, laborers. But what man is there 
who if, in speaking of a strike, he were to say 
that he supported, or opposed, the claims of 
labor, would be understood as meaning the 
claims of employers and millionaires like 
these? It is evident that no one would under- 
stand him in such a sense ; and if he used the 
word labor thus, he would be merely trifling 
with language. The word— for all practical 
purposes— has its meaning unequivocally fixed. 
It does not mean all human exertion; it em- 
phatically means a part of it only. It means 
muscular and manual exertion, or exertion of 
which the ordinary man is capable, as distinct 
from industrial exertion of any other kind ; and 
not only as distinct from it, but as actually op- 
posed to and struggling with it. ' ' 

Ah, yes ; just there, in fact, is the tragedy of 
the whole business ; and in that last sentence of 

46 



THE WORKING MAN 

Mr. Mallock's lies the point of his whole argu- 
ment. It is in vain, in other words, that we 
endeavor, by amiable sophisms which, true 
enough once, have long ago ceased to be true 
to obscure to ourselves or to others that tre- 
mendous cleavage which, in our time, has come 
to pass between the rest of human society and 
those who make up what we call the working 
classes. In part I have already indicated the 
causes of that cleavage, and they are, in turn, 
the influences through which, alas ! it has been 
too often widened and deepened. 

In some degree, undoubtedly, they are the 
result of ignorance or of misapprehension. 
The development of industrial activities in 
the century that has just closed has resulted 
in a vast increase in the world's wealth; and, 
especially in our own country, in aggregations 
of wealth which have greatly accentuated to 
the working classes the enormous discrepan- 
cies between themselves and the capitalist 
classes. The commonest form in which this 
expresses itself is that ^^the rich are growing 
richer, and the poor are growing poorer, ' ' and 
more acute expressions of it are not greatly 
different from a speech which I find in an 

47 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

organ of labor pnblislied, curiously enough, in 
Boston, and in which occur these words: ^^In 
a land whose bowels teem with all the varieties 
of natural wealth, men are naked, homeless, 
and starving; you who bear the burden of an 
extravagant, a wanton, a barbaric luxury, and 
yet have not wherewith to appease your hun- 
ger,— starved, imprisoned, tortured into sub- 
jection, ^Pinkertoned' to death; you who, 
from your miserable hovels see the palaces of 
your masters rising around you; who can be- 
hold their luxurious equipages, and yet must 
trudge on foot yourselves ; you can read of their 
ocean greyhounds, their trips to Europe, their 
Newports, their Saratogas; and, deprived 
yourselves of air and light, with no vacations, 
few amusements, and less rational enjoyment, 
will you calmly see all this when you know that 
all this fabric of luxury and ease springs from 
your labor ?"^ 

The gravamen of this invective consists, as 
you will perceive, in the implied claim that the 
product of labor, which belongs of right to the 
laborer, is, by some adroit but essentially dis- 
honest process, diverted from his pocket, and 

1 '^The Labor Leader/' Boston, April 9, 1892. 

48 



THE WORKING MAN 

goes— the vast proportion of it— not into tlie 
laborer's wage but into the employer's profit. 
And this is, indeed, the claim of a whole school 
of social economists, of whom the late Karl 
Marx was the leader, and whose theories have 
now come to be widely accepted by working 
men in all parts of the civilized world. The 
official language of what I believe was, not long 
ago, the largest labor organization in this or 
any other country, as published under the title 
^^ Polity of the Labor Movement,"^ is: (1) 
^^That labor creates all wealth. (2) That all 
wealth belongs to those who create it. ' ' From 
this it manifestly follows ^^that all wealth right- 
fully belongs to the laborer." It is not sur- 
prising that, deceived by such sophistries as 
these, the working man regards his employer 
with distrust, and considers the present social 
order but little better than legalized robbery. 
But the most melancholy feature in the whole 
situation is that such sophistries have been 
caught up by many earnest people who are not 
working men, but who have been moved, by 
what they believe to be the wrongs of working 
men, to espouse their cause. For, thou^gh it 

iVol. T, p. 4. 
49 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ought not to be necessary, it may be opportune, 
to say that all such teaching is as false as it is 
vicious, and to point out why it is so. Nothing 
could be more essentially grotesque than to 
say that labor, in the sense in which I have al- 
ready defined it here, creates all wealth, or that 
it creates any considerable part of it. That 
which creates incomparably the largest part 
of wealth is not muscular force, or physical 
strength, or bodily energy. These might toil 
a thousand years, if life were stretched so long, 
and produce no more, even then, than the fruit 
of their labor at the end of their first day's or 
first week's work. For, forever, over against 
the mere day-laborer who delves, or plants, or 
forges with his hands, stand the inexorable 
wants of his daily life which daily devour what 
he daily produces. And therefore it is only 
when that which is not labor, but intelligence, 
foresight, ability, mental cleverness, the genius 
of invention, the genius of organization,— call 
it what you will, the name is of infinitesi- 
mal consequence,— comes in and takes this 
labor, and touches it with its magic wand, and 
bends it to its clever will, and coordinates it by 
its masterly intuitions, that there come the vast 
results, in all the countless productive meclia- 

50 



THE WORKING MAN 

nisms and motors of the modern industrial 
world, that have made that world the thing 
that it is to-day. Mr. Mallock's image of the 
bronze statue is, if only a little changed, the 
perfect picture of the whole matter. Here be- 
fore us are two colossal figures which have 
been fused, each, in fierce fires, and wrought of 
costly metals, and fashioned at last into the 
image of a man. The workmen who gathered 
the fuel and kindled the fires and mined the 
metal have fashioned one of them, unaided and 
alone, as best they could. And another set of 
workmen have mined and fired and fashioned 
their image too, but with this single difference : 
that, beside them as they wrought, guiding, 
suggesting, correcting, informing them as they 
toiled, was Praxiteles, or Michelangelo, or 
Canova, or Crawford, or St. Gaudens; and, as 
a consequence, when the two statues stand com- 
pleted, one is worth its weight in brass, and not 
one penny more, and the other is worth well- 
nigh its weight in gold. And yet by him who 
has given to it all this priceless worth no ore 
was mined, nor fire built, nor metal forged— no, 
not an ounce, from first to last! 

But while thus we dismiss one fallacy of the 
modern labor movement with no more con- 

51 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

tempt than it deserves, the graver aspects of 
the situation do not disappear. A recent writer 
on the wage question ^ has shown with great 
cleverness how large a proportion of the earn- 
ings of modern capital goes directly into the 
pocket of the working man; and, by way of 
heightening the force of his argument, has pre- 
sented a series of contrasts which, if no more, 
are dramatic. In the fourteenth century, for 
instance, as Eden in his ^' State of the Poor" 
records, an inventory of the household furni- 
ture of a peasant, six years before the death of 
Edward I, gave this return : ^ 

£ s. d. 

A maize cup 6 

A bed 1 6 

A tripod 3 

A brass pot 1 

A brass cup 6 

An andiron 3^ 

A brass dish 6 

A gridiron 5 

A rug or coverlet 8 

5 7-1 

^G. Guntor, "Wealth and Progress." 
2 Eden's "State of the Poor," Vol/ I, p. 22. 

52 



THE WORKING MAN 

In otlier words, the whole equipment of the 
household of a working man was in Edward 
I's time, ordinarily, of the value of about one 
dollar and thirty-seven cents. The man whose 
home this made earned twelve cents a week; 
and, lest we should suppose that his money had 
a much larger purchasing power than its 
amount implies, Hallam tells us that the diet 
of such an one was usually pottage, and his 
garment a rough hide. The history of wages 
is almost a literature in itself, and it would be 
quite impossible to follow the progress of the 
workman's wages in detail from the fourteenth 
century to the twentieth. One or two facts the 
enquirer will discover, of a general character, 
however, and we may wisely hold them in mind. 
For the three or four centuries that followed 
the thirteenth century, which we may take as 
sufficiently illustrating the status of the medi- 
aeval laborer, the standard of wages changed 
surprisingly little. It rose slightly sometimes, 
but, again, it fell ; and though there was a slight 
advance as wealth grew and the demands of a 
higher civilization increased, it has been re- 
served for our own generation to witness the 
most remarkable growth in the gains of the 

53 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

wage-earner to be found in all his history. In 
a paper read before Section F at a recent meet- 
ing of the British Association,^ ^^Mr. A. L. 
Bowley compared the rates of increase of 
wages in the United States and in Great Brit- 
ain between 1860 and 1891. The conclusion 
at which he arrived was as follows: ^In both 
countries real wages rose some 20 per cent, 
between 1860 and the maximum period of 
1871-74 ; money wages rose 50 per cent, in the 
United States and between 30 and 40 per cent, 
in the United Kingdom in the same period. 
The rise in real wages was checked in 1879-80 
in the United States, but continued with little 
interruption in England; money wages fell to 
a minimum in 1879-80 in both countries. 
After 1880, money wages rose continuously 
(with a check in 1886) till 1891, and real wages 
rose more rapidly in both countries. . . • In 
both countries money wages were at much the 
same level in 1873 and 1891, this level being 
relatively higher in the United States than in 
Great Britain. In both countries real wages 
were higher in 1891 than in 1873; and, when 
purchasing power is thus taken into considera- 

1 Septembel- 12, 1895. 
54 



THE WORKING MAN 

tion, the increase in the whole period is found 
to be greater in Great Britain. The relative 
height attained cannot be estimated exactly, but 
the figures lead to the conclusion that between 
the years 1860 and 1891 real wages increased 
in the United States about 60 per cent, and 
more than 70 per cent, in the United King- 
dom.' "^ 

But what, it may be asked, has all this to do 
with the cry of the working man that capital 
is getting more than its fair share of the prod- 
ucts of industry? Just this: that during the 
period which I have indicated, a widow having 
a railway bond for $5000 from which, twenty 
years ago, she received $350 per annum (and 
remember that this widow, though this $5000 
bond may easily be her all,— the single plank 
that she has between her and absolute want,— 
is still one of the hated capitalistic class— a 
class, let me observe by the way, far more nu- 
merous, more wide-spread, and more depen- 
dent than we are apt to suppose ; a class stand- 
ing often for those whom, where want pinches, 
it pinches worst, for such an one has been edu- 
cated to have many needs which to the working 

1 Quoted in "The Labor Problem/^ Drage, p. 33. 
55 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

man are the merest affectations),— consider, I 
say, that this widow who, twenty years ago, re- 
ceived $350 per annum from her little capital, 
is lucky now if she gets $250 from it, and 
oftener still gets only $200 per annum. 

In other words, and that is the point toward 
which I am moving, the last quarter of a cen- 
tury—to speak in general terms— has brought 
to the working man an increase in his earnings 
of from 60 to 70 per cent., while the same 
period has cost the capitalist the loss of from 
20 to 30 per cent, upon his. 

^^Ah, yes,'' replies the working man, *^all 
this may be true enough; but it does not, after 
all, alter in any considerable degree the essen- 
tial equities of the case. Capital as such earns 
less than heretofore, but why? Simply because 
there is so much of it. In one sense it is like 
anything else, a commodity, and commodities 
are cheap because they are plenty. The bor- 
rower no longer needs to pay the capitalist 7 
per cent, for his money, for the simple reason 
that there is so much capital that the possessors 
are glad to loan it on good security for 4, or 
even 3 J per cent. But who created the capital ? 
How could it have come into existence without 

56 



THE WORKING MAN 

the working man, and why is it that, having so 
largely created it, he so slightly benefits from 
its increase?" 

The question recalls a spectacle which one 
may see in Burma, in the ship-yards at Ran- 
goon. There, on any morning all round the 
year, the traveller may observe a process whose 
interest is even greater in its suggestiveness 
than in its unwontedness. As you enter the 
ship-yard, your eye is caught by three or four 
huge and unwieldy figures which, to your 
amazement, are, as you discover, engaged in 
loading, unloading, or stacking timbers. The 
figures are those of elephants that, with a 
painstaking, a method, a precision, and a pa- 
tience that seem almost more than human, are 
seizing huge logs of oak, or mahogany, or teak 
wood with their trunks, balancing them care- 
fully as they lift them from the ship 's deck that 
lies beside the wharf, carrying them through 
the winding pathways toward their destination, 
and when that destination is reached, lifting 
them, each one, to its place upon the great stack 
in the ship-yard, and as it rests there, gently 
pushing each timber with knee or trunk until 
it rests in its precise position, as nicely and 

57 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

exactly aligned as though the task had been 
performed with rule and square and guided 
by a human hand. ' ' Wonderful creature ! ' ' you 
exclaim. ^^Wliat a rare order of intelligence 
is here, and how sure and unerring the facul- 
ties that can accomplish such a work in such 
a way!" But, as you look a little closer, you 
note that, seated upon the neck of the huge ani- 
mal is a slight figure, often seemingly a mere 
lad, with a slender wand in his hand, which, 
however, he rarely raises, and with which you 
never see him strike a blow. You watch him, 
however, still more closely, and you note the 
intermittent pressure of his heel upon the neck 
of the animal that he rides,— and that is all! 
But, indeed, just there is the secret of the whole 
business. The brute obeys the man. The 
clever intelligence and gentle touch of the Bur- 
mese rider's heel guides, directs, restrains, 
constrains, energizes, the enormous living bulk 
beneath him, and converts it from a destroying 
monster into a faithful and untiring servant. 

The parable in these modern days is of uni- 
versal application. In a thousand ways, mod- 
ern genius contrives, constructs, organizes, and 
correlates mechanisms and forces which some- 

58 



THE WORKING MAN 

liow pass into the common possession of the 
great mass of the people; often in such ways 
that they come to disassociate them wholly 
from their creators, and to think that the mill, 
the engine, the machine, and the man who fires 
and follows it are the creators of onr mod- 
ern civilization. They are among the creators 
of that civilization, but, from first to last, they 
are dependent for its effective fruitage upon 
some other wholly outside of either. 

It is undoubtedly true that while there are 
still large numbers of working men who persist 
in denying this, and who therefore persist in 
urging the unwarrantable claims to which I 
have referred, there are others who do nothing 
of the sort. They are intelligent enough to see 
that industry could win no victories without 
the captains of industry; that machinery could 
maintain no place of consistent achievement 
in the world, if there were not men who not 
merely contrived it but improved upon it, and 
whose marvellous powers of contrivance 
marched side by side— nay, often far in ad- 
vance—of the marvellous tasks to which indus- 
trial forces have been summoned in our day. 
Such working men recognize and concede to 

59 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

tlie inventor, the capitalist, the clever execu- 
tive, the master-bnilder or master-machinist, 
each his place of rightfully greater honor and 
emolument for greater service rendered. Bnt 
while he does so, the working man insists that, 
notwithstanding all that can be urged as to the 
rise of wages in recent years, especially in our 
own country, the conditions under which the 
working man labors make his position increas- 
ingly unsatisfactory and precarious. 

And in a very real sense he is right. I have 
already, as you will remember, and in another 
connection, referred to one reason for this; for 
insisting upon the hardship of which, a few 
years ago, on some public occasion, in a neigh- 
boring city, I was very roundly abused, but as 
to the essential cruelty of which I shall still 
take leave to say there can be no smallest doubt. 
I refer to the results to the working man 
of industrial specialization. "We are moving 
along that line, in these times, with increasing 
ardor and unanimity in almost every connec- 
tion. Fifty years ago an ordinary household 
had its family physician, who, whether one's 
ailment was of the heart or of the liver, was 
summoned with equal confidence and usually, 

60 



THE WORKING MAN 

on the whole, with equal advantage. But to- 
day I must wait upon one learned gentleman 
for an affection of my throat, and another for 
that of my heart, and another for disorders of 
my nerves. It would not be becoming a layman 
to speculate upon the effect of this narrowing 
of his range upon the medical man himself, 
but there can be no slightest question as to its 
effect, in the industrial world, upon the work- 
ing man. I shall not speak now of its intolera- 
ble irksomeness, dreariness, its benumbing and 
stupefying influence, for I have already else- 
where referred to these; but it is most impor- 
tant that we should recognize those disabling 
effects which must inevitably have so consid- 
erable and disastrous an influence upon the 
Y7orking man's efficiency, his productiveness 
or economic utility as a wage-earner in any 
other than one particular mill, at one particular 
task, with one particular tool. In any other 
mill, at any other task, with any other tool, this 
man is worthless,— smd this is what the great 
march of industrial progress, over which we 
are all wont to rejoice, has done for him! 

Do you wonder now at one result of such a 
situation, with which of late we have been much 

Gl 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

concerned, and wliicli, if you and I and Chris- 
tian people generally are to serve the cause of 
the working man, it behooves us to under- 
stand,— I mean the trades-union? We are as 
yet too near it to realize the meaning of that 
tremendous change which has come to the work- 
ing man during the century that has just ended. 
^^For ages the rule had been that the working 
man himself owned his own machine as well 
as the raw materials of his own industry. '^ 
But even before the dawn of that great indus- 
trial revolution produced by modern ma- 
chinery hitched to steam, electricity, and the 
like, there had begun that departure from this 
earlier and simpler state of things which intro- 
duced the merchant who dealt in raw material 
and the mill-owner who manufactured it. And 
out of this beginning of change it came to pass 
that the working man was separated farther 
and farther from his life of earlier indepen- 
dence, and reduced more and more, himself, 
to the condition of a mere machine. Until you 
and I have stood where he has stood, until those 
who are not working men and women can re- 
alize the grim despair that stares them in the 
face as they are held in the grip of some huge 

62 



THE WORKING MAN 

mechanism of capital and machinery, until we 
can understand what it is to work, or to stand 
idle, not as the impulse to labor or the needs of 
our families demand, but as the whim of the 
employer or the condition of the market, bare 
to-day and glutted to-morrow, shall decide, we 
are in no condition adequately to appreciate 
that stern necessity out of which the trades- 
union has grown. I presume I should express 
not inaccurately the mental attitude of great 
multitudes of people in regard to these organi- 
zations if I said that they regard them with 
disfavor, and watch their growth and influence 
with dread. A greater blunder in estimating 
them could not well be made! They have, 
indeed, more than once earned the distrust of 
the community at large, and have deserved it. 
Here and there they have lent themselves to 
acts of violence for which there was no suffi- 
cient justification, and, worst of all, have 
broken explicit pledges with swift indifference 
and with scanty scruple. But when we judge 
them in connection with such acts, we must re- 
member that they, too, have known what it was 
to have agreements disregarded or pledges 
cleverly evaded; and in all our criticisms of 

63 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

tliem we shall do well to recognize the fact that, 
in the final analysis of the principles of their 
organization, they stand for all that society it- 
self as an organized entity stands for,— the free 
consent of the governed. ^^As a matter of 
fact," as Mr. Geoffrey Drage has admirably 
pnt it, ^^the value of the trades-nnion move- 
ment is to be estimated not so much by the 
extent to which it has raised the rate of wages 
or reduced the hours of labor, as by its educa- 
tional influence as a preparation for the re- 
sponsibilities of self-government. The great- 
ness of the friendly-society movement must be 
measured not more by the material aid which 
it has afforded to the working man in time of 
need, than by the stimulus which it has given 
to the moral qualities of thrift and indepen- 
dence. The worth of the cooperative move- 
ment does not depend only on its ability to 
increase the capacity of the workmen's earn- 
ings, but also on the insight which it has af- 
forded them into the complexities of business 
life. The education which these voluntary as- 
sociations have provided for the working man 
has given a new purpose to his life. . . . ' Still 
more than all this,' Dr. Baernreither, a 

C4 



THE WORKING MAN 

foreign observer, states, ^the workman who 
has established and who directs these as- 
sociations has ceased to be an inactive spec- 
tator of the state and of society. His life has 
received a new purpose and character. . . . 
His understanding and his insight in economic 
matters are increasing; he is learning by his 
experience to recognize the difficulties which 
oppose themselves to the carrying out of social 
institutions ; he is becoming more moderate in 
his claims, calmer in judgment, and more con- 
tented with success. On the other hand, he 
is losing nothing of that pertinacity in the pur- 
suit of his ends which has always been his 
distinctive characteristic. Step by step, by his 
meetings, journals, and congresses, he is at- 
tracting the general interest of the public, 
acquiring an influence in local (and even na- 
tional) bodies, and becoming a more active, 
independent, and powerful factor in state life. 
But the main thing is that the world of thought 
is filled with things clearly practicable and 
attainable, and that no Utopias find place 
in it.' "1 

This is the judgment, concerning the labor 

1 ^' English Associations of Working Men/' by Dr. Baernreither. 

65 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

and kindred organizations of tlie Anglo-Saxon 
working man, of a foreigner of wide observa- 
tion and philosophic insight. I am not pre- 
pared to say that we can, here, accept it an pied 
de la lettre; but, in substance, it is unquestion- 
ably the statement of a great truth in regard 
to trades-unions which those who are outside 
of them will be wise unreservedly to recognize. 
A leading element of menace in such organiza- 
tions consists in the fact, for which we, not they 
who are of them, are responsible, that we have 
cared so little to understand them; that we 
have striven so little to sympathize with them ; 
and that, worst of all, our personal attitude 
toward them has been so remote and frigid, if 
not distinctly hostile. It has been my great 
privilege— I account it one of the chief est of 
my life— to come into frequent and intimate 
contact with men who represented trades- 
unions in great variety, which were inclusive of 
individuals who ranged, in their culture and 
attainments, all the way from the humblest 
day-laborer to the most skilled craftsman, arti- 
san, and all but artist ; and I have found, in all 
of them, qualities in which, far more than in 
any written covenants with their employers, 

66 



THE WORKING MAN 

lie the highest hopes of the future. "We are apt 
too often to derive our impressions of the men- 
tal attitudes of other people from words or acts 
which are the result of extreme provocation; 
and to forget that these no more represent an- 
other's normal and usual mental attitude than 
the temperature of his blood under such condi- 
tions represents his normal physical condition ; 
but for myself, at any rate, I am constrained to 
say that the susceptibility of a working man of 
fair intelligence to dispassionate reasoning, 
and his readiness to be influenced by the force 
of it, are quite as great as I have ordinarily 
found in employers or others of their class, 
though the latter were often persons of much 
higher culture. 

Such a fact has a far higher significance than 
at first appears ; for it opens the door to those 
wider considerations without a reference to 
which such a discussion as this would be largely 
in vain. No view, that is to say, of the working 
man and of the duty to him of Christian men 
who do not hold a place themselves in the 
ranks, as I have defined them, of working men, 
can be of any substantial value which does not 
recognize that the higher future of the work- 

67 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ing man must largely depend, finally, upon 
himself. And upon this I would insist, though 
I do not forget that there have been various 
specifics for remedying the injustices or the 
inequalities of his present condition, on which 
from time to time social economists have built 
large hopes, and which I may not here leave 
unnoticed. 

One of these has been what is known as in- 
dustrial cooperation, the principle of which is 
that the workman, over and above a fixed wage, 
shall receive a percentage of the profits made 
in the business of his employer, and find in 
such percentage not only a more adequate re- 
ward for his services but a stimulus to greater 
zeal and fi.delity in his work. The scheme was 
born of a beautiful ideal, and it has had, at 
least in France, a limited measure of success. 
But while it has appealed both to the just inter- 
ests and the worthy ambitions of working men, 
it has not, on the whole, found as yet in them 
the qualities that insure its success. A Welsh 
colliery company entered, a few years ago, into 
a permanent contract with its workmen, where- 
by the latter were to receive, in addition 
to the current rate of wages, one half of the 
profits above 10 per cent, for the redemption 

68 



THE WORKING MAN 

of capital invested. As long as there were 
profits, and the rate of wages presented no dif- 
ficulty, this answered well enough; but when 
the tide turned and there were no profits, but 
only loss unless wages were reduced, the situa- 
tion was wholly altered, at any rate in the es- 
timate of the workmen, and the compact was 
broken up, on the demand of the men them- 
selves, who said they should prefer to be sim- 
ply members of the ' ' Miners ' Union. ' ' ^ 

The difficulty in such cases, and indeed in all 
eases of a like class, arises out of a twofold 
feature in them, the presence of which is all 
but inevitable. In the first place, the working 
man, as a partner, is without capital, and has 
therefore no resources with which to stand con- 
tinued losses ; and, in the second place, it often 
happens that he is too imperfectly educated as 
a business man to bring to the cooperative en- 
terprise, of whatever sort it may happen to be, 
anything else than an unintelligent and too 
often obstructive criticism. 

The same objections lie, to a certain extent, 
against another method for the organization of 
modern industry, which has in it, however, 

1 See article Co-operation, in the Encyclopsedia 
Britannica. 

69 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

much larger elements of promise, and which 
has achieved, already, a much larger measure 
of success. I mean that known as profit- 
sharing. Under this scheme the working man 
has a direct interest in the success of that in 
which he is engaged, over and above his wage, 
and receives a certain percentage, fixed before- 
hand, or graduated, from time to time, accord- 
ing to the success of the business. In France, 
and also in this country, there have been in- 
stances in which this plan has been worked 
with considerable profit and with mutual sat- 
isfaction : but the element of weakness in it lies 
in the inevitable control of the business by 
others than the workman. If the proprietor 
of a mill mismanages his business, according 
to my judgment, but yet pays me my stipulated 
wage, his mismanagement is largely a matter 
of indifference to me. But if he mismanages 
his business, as I judge his management, while 
under an agreement to pay me not only a wage 
but a percentage of his profits, then at once his 
mismanagement, as I account it, becomes for 
me a very serious and personal matter. And 
yet I may not interfere, and am powerless to 
alter or arrest a policy which, to me, appears 
foolish and fatah 

70 



THE WORKING MAN 

I would not be understood, in saying this 
much, as undervaluing the two really great 
movements, as I think they deserve to be ac- 
counted, of cooperative industry and profit- 
sharing ; for they have, as their highest signifi- 
cance, a real note of sensitiveness as to what 
is due to the working man in connection with 
our industrial progress, and are, from this 
point of view, of large inspiration. Undoubt- 
edly, as Mackenzie has said, ' ' There is evidence 
that the sense of personal obligation as in- 
volved in business is becoming largely ex- 
tended. Masters, here and there, are begin- 
ning to realize that their position as captains 
of industry has a moral as well as an economic 
aspect''; but it must still be owned that in 
such methods as these the labor problem has 
not as yet found its sufficient solution. 

For myself, however, I believe that these ex- 
periments, tentative and often unsuccessful as 
they have been, nevertheless point the way 
toward that solution, though it will not, it 
should be distinctly said, be found by proceed- 
ing indefinitely along a line the direction of 
which, as some of our most ardent social re- 
formers maintain, the experiments of coopera- 
tion and profit-sharing indicate. This, as you 

71 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

Yvill have anticipated me in saying, is a direc- 
tion which ends in what just now is known as 
collectivism. Collectivism is that theory or 
system of industrial organization under which 
all private property is taken over by the state 
and run for the public benefit,— or, rather, to 
be more precise, for the equal benefit of each 
individual in the whole community. The ap- 
parent advantages of such a system are very 
obvious, and, to the imagination of an over- 
worked man or woman, very attractive. In the 
first place, it would, if successful in its opera- 
tions, remove from life the mere struggle for 
existence. Each one would be sure of his share 
of the whole earnings of the public industries, 
paid at fixed times, and at an absolutely equal 
rate. In the second place, the enormous dis- 
parities between wealth and poverty would, at 
one stroke, disappear ; and the tyrannies of the 
one and the degrading temptations of the 
other would no longer be possible. And 
finally, under a system so thoroughly de-indi- 
vidualized as this, the rivalries and competi- 
tions that so largely embitter life would vanish ; 
and peace and order, beauty and sunshine, 
would reign throughout the world. 

72 



THE WORKING MAN 

It is a fair and fascinating picture ; but, be- 
fore attempting to realize it— as undoubtedly 
working men, in whose hands are the ballots 
which are the final arbiters in any national 
policy under our form of government, could at 
least begin to do by decreeing that economic 
revolution which must precede it— before, I 
say, attempting to realize it, it will be well for 
working men to look candidly in the face those 
ethical and economic conditions which underlie 
the whole subject. 

Let us imagine, then, for a moment, that the 
whole industrial capital of the United States, 
both corporate and individual, whether in 
money or machinery, has been taken over by 
the state, and is to be administered by it or its 
representatives for the benefit of the whole 
people. The first questions, obviously, which 
would arise are. Who are to administer it? and. 
How are they to be selected? and. Plow are they 
to be compensated? To which the answer 
would be, I presume, that this administration 
is to be by persons chosen by the authority of 
the officers of the state for that purpose. But 
here at once, you will see, you have violated 
your fundamental principle of absolute equal- 

73 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ity, since, if one man is to sit in an office in a 
clean linen shirt (if he can afford one), and 
issne orders to another man who is sweltering 
in a rolling mill, naked to the waist and drip- 
ping with perspiration, they certainly are not 
in possession of equal conditions or equal privi- 
leges. And if you say that this can be reme- 
died by making the manager of to-day the hand 
laborer of to-morrow, and by conducting the 
works upon some such large system of daily 
alternatives, then you are confronted with dif- 
ficulties in, e.g.^ the disproportion of workmen 
to managers, which, in that direction, indicate 
very plainly that we have come to a hopeless 
impasse. 

But again : Suppose that, for the sake of the 
system, we have in such a case made an excep- 
tion, let us pass on to another. The industries 
of the nation having now passed into the hands 
of the state, what are the prospects of the 
state itself? A crying evil in the present in- 
dustrial system, it is maintained by those who 
would abolish it, consists in the fluctuations 
of labor, good times and bad times, mills 
running when it will pay, and idle when it will 
not; and state control of industries would, we 

74 



THE WORKING MAN 

are told, correct all this by providing steady 
and unbroken employment for all men at all 
times. Again, I say, a beautiful and fascinat- 
ing theory, but one which altogether leaves 
out of account those various influences, wholly 
beyond the control of the state, which are rep- 
resented by failure of crops, fluctuations in 
trade, commercial rivalries of other nations, 
war, famine, pestilence, and a whole group of 
other influences which are as wholly outside the 
control of the state as are the motion of the 
heavenly bodies. 

And then, finally, as we have had most pain- 
ful evidence, especially in our great centres 
of population, the erection of the state or com- 
munal authorities, of whatever name, into an 
employer introduces possibilities of corruption 
which the most humiliating experience has 
taught us to be almost inseparable from such 
a system. In times of commercial, financial, 
or agricultural depression even the state can- 
not provide work for every man ; and, when it 
can, the different kinds of work, some of it light 
and easy, but more of it, as it easily may be, 
exhausting and repulsive, afford a temptation 
for corrupting the official employer of labor 

75 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

by bribe for ^'soft places," which, as the em- 
ployer has no personal interest in the thorough- 
ness or excellence of the work, he has no slight- 
est motive of self-interest for refusing, and 
every sordid motive for accepting. 

I need not pursue these illustrations further. 
They point alike, with equal clearness, to the 
conclusion that the collectivist theory is a the- 
ory that will serve the well-being of the work- 
ing man as little as that of his employer. 
^^ Monopoly," it has been pithily said, ^'extin- 
guishes the evils of competition, but with them 
its benefits ' ' ; and of no other monopoly is this 
so true as of that of the state. ' ' There is, ' ' as 
Mr. Drage has pointed out, ''no kind of work 
w^hich can long stand the loss of the spur of 
competition. There is scarcely an industry 
which does not depend from one day to another 
upon competition for life and progress. In a 
few the stages of rest may be of some duration, 
but the general tendency of all is to recast the 
methods of production, more or less radically, 
from year to year. A varied demand and vig- 
orous competitive offer can alone create and 
maintain this wholesome state of progress 
which, in a purely industrial community, strug- 

76 



THE WORKING MAN 

gling with rivals in all quarters of the globe, 
is the sole condition of existence. Public and 
municipal production means the reduction and 
extinction of all the conditions that make for 
competition," and, worse than this, tends in- 
evitably to the corruption and enervation of 
those whom such a system employs. ^^Such 
tendencies," it has justly been demanded, 
' ' must be faced and met by those who advocate 
the extension of the sphere of employment by 
public authorities. Up to the present, history 
has shown the ' virtue, energy, and self-interest 
of each individual' to be the greatest motive 
power in human affairs. . . . " The advo- 
cates of an extension of public employment 
ignore or underestimate facts of this kind ; urg- 
ing that past history affords no test as to the 
results of an extended democratic bureaucracy. 
Their belief, however, is at present entirely a 
matter of faith. ^^It seems to me," says Lord 
Farrar, one of the ablest and. most dispassion- 
ate authorities upon this whole question, ^^that 
while the old economy was a science or at- 
tempted science which tried to investigate 
facts, the present socialistic economy is a 
speech. "... " My feeling about it, ' ' he adds, 

77 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

^^is that, while we may sympathize entirely 
with its objects, we often find it at fault in not 
recognizing the facts of the world, and there- 
fore assuming that it can disregard the limita- 
tions which arise from the facts. "^ 

But if, let me now ask in conclusion, in no 
one of these directions we may look for the 
panacea for those problems of the working 
man which I have thus far discussed, whither 
must we turn? 

The answer to that question is to be found, 
I believe, rather in a new purpose and a new 
point of view, than in any particular methods. 
The fundamental defect in our modern situa- 
tion, so far as the working man is concerned, 
is that we have not understood him, nor cared 
to. When the time shall come that the em- 
ployer and the capitalist shall realize that their 
interests and his are not two, but one, then we 
shall at least have taken the first step toward 
the solution of these issues which now threaten, 
as it seems sometimes, to disrupt the social 
structure itself. Something to this end can be 
done by legislation, though not so much nor so 
effectually as is ordinarily supposed. Some- 

1 See '' The Labor Problem," Drage, pp. 301-302. 
78 



THE WORKING MAN 

thing more can be done by the recovery for 
the many of privileges and perquisites which 
are now within the reach only of the few; but 
most of all can be accomplished by mutual un- 
derstanding on the part of different classes, 
and then by mutual confidence and respect. 
Almost the worst enemy to the progress of hu- 
man society is the spirit of caste ; and the tragic 
element in the constitution of our modern social 
structure is that, under forms of government 
that profess long ago to have renounced and 
abandoned it, it still rears its head in forms 
more insolent and more mischievous than any 
that in any age of human history it has as- 
sumed. For while we may be patient with the 
caste spirit when it survives as the product, in 
earlier ages, of marked tribal distinctions, or, 
in later ages, as the inheritance of a long line 
of feudal tradition or distinguished ancestry, 
it becomes, when we see it, as too often we see 
it to-day, the mere incarnation of material pos- 
sessions in huge bulk and adroit association, a 
menace alike to the rights of the weak and the 
freedom of the poor. And so we need not only 
to be afraid of it, but to be concerned for it. A 
caste of capitalists, separated by practically im- 

79 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

passable barriers from a caste of workers, 
means social anarchy and industrial war; and 
the only remedy for a situation so grave is in 
that unresting and self-sacrificing activity on 
the part of those who are outside of the working 
men's caste which shall first break into and 
then dissolve it by a temper and a service that 
shall transform hostile interests into common 
interests, and narrow and mean ambitions into 
higher and nobler aspirations. ' ' For this pur- 
pose/' as Mr. John Beattie Crozier has ad- 
mirably put it, ' ' we must multiply all the aids 
and outlooks necessary to the differentiation 
and classification of men, instead of leaving 
them lumped together as mere ^working m.en'; 
and to this end the land must be more broken 
up for the purchase of plots both in town and 
country; cheap dwelling houses must be 
erected ; . . . schools of technique and design, 
and of everything connected with industry, 
without limit or stint, so that everything which 
will help to push the clever workman a stage 
farther may be at hand to assist him: and es- 
pecially every security that can be devised for 
protecting him in and enabling him to get the 
full value of his inventions. In this way, with 

80 



THE WORKING MAN 

this indispensable minimum as a start, followed 
up and aided by all the apparatus with which 
rising talent has to work, as well as by all col- 
lateral incentives in the shape of property- 
owning, profit-sharing, and the like : with these 
all graded up to the topmost step, and the work- 
men pressing forward across the gulf separat- 
ing them from capital to ascend the ladder 
of capital itself. Capital and Labor, instead of 
confronting each other as solid masses in op- 
posing camps, would be broken up into infinite 
grades and subdivisions with no unbridgable 
gaps anywhere between, and, like an army 
where each private carries a possible commis- 
sion in his pocket, there would be no longer 
capitalists and workmen, but only Men at dif- 
ferent stages on the rungs of the industrial 
ladder, a ladder which includes both capitalists 
and laborers, and is without breach of con- 
tinuity from bottom to top. With all this, . . . 
and with each rung of the ladder charged with 
new possibilities, so that each step gained is a 
help to the one above it, men start fairly 
equipped for the battle of life; while intellect 
and character, united in their various aspects, 
being the chief means of advancement, must 

81 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

end by becoming the twin ideals of the. 
nation. ' '^ 

A noble ideal, snrely! May it be theirs 
whose office it is, in their relations alike with 
the humblest and the highest, as scholars and 
as citizens, to ilkistrate their Master's spirit, 
to seek thus to transform with it the life of 
the working man ! 

1 ^^ History of Intellectual Development/^ etc., 
Crozier, pp. 141-142. 



82 



Ill 

THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

THE topic of which I am to speak in this 
lecture, suggests, as indeed must more 
than once have occurred to you, the unavoida- 
bly cursory character of any such discussion 
as the limits of these lectures permit. In 
speaking, as I am now to do, of the citizen and 
the capitalist, it would be difficult to exclude, 
if we were to attempt to do so, any one of 
the great issues that belong to modern civ- 
ics. Within the area thus defined lie all the 
graver questions that touch our social order 
and life ; and an adequate and complete dis- 
cussion of them, as any one will realize who 
has attempted to familiarize himself with the 
sociological writers of our own generation 
alone, would be a literature in itself. For, 
hardly anywhere, as a very little reading of it 
will demonstrate, are there points of view so 

83 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

remote, and lines of argument so divergent, 
from one another. 

It will be understood, therefore, I think, that 
what is now attempted is suggestive rather than 
exhaustive; introductory rather than final; a 
stimulus, if one may venture to hope that these 
words may fulfil so useful a purpose, toward 
further inquiry, rather than anything so large 
and difficult as its final answer. The need of 
this moment— and I shall, for myself, be con- 
tent if I can be able, though only in some par- 
tial measure, to supply it— is to arouse earnest 
and thoughtful minds to inquiry, and to 
awaken in those whose calling it is, and will 
be more and more, to be guides and helpers of 
their fellow-men in the dark places of life, the 
aspiration to be at least in some measure com- 
petent to a task so noble. To be privileged 
to teach a mind perplexed, embittered, exas- 
perated by the hard and, as it often seems to 
him, heartless conditions of our modern indus- 
trial life, first, to recognize the causes which 
have produced those conditions; and then, so 
far as they are remediable conditions, how best 
we may, all together, teacher and pupil, master 
and servant, workman and foreman, contractor, 

84 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

capitalist and consumer, labor for their solu- 
tion,— this, I cannot but think, is one of the wor- 
thiest tasks to which man, in the service of his 
brother man, can address himself. 

You will understand, therefore, why, for the 
subjects of these lectures, I have selected those 
which, including that introductory to this 
course, I announced to you. There are other 
themes, doubtless, which might be regarded as 
having equal if not greater claim upon our 
earlier attention. But those which I have des- 
ignated for our consideration have at least 
this distinctive merit,— they are both typical 
and comprehensive. They stand, severally, 
for those largest classes into which, after all, 
though they may not be precisely included in 
any one of them, all the members of civilized 
society, as they approximate, severally, to the 
one or the other, fall. Largely speaking, they 
represent our modern humanity, and they des- 
ignate it. 

This will be recognized the more clearly, I 
think, if I proceed at once to the considera- 
tion of the subject of this lecture, '^The Capi- 
talist." 

^^What is a capitalist T' asks a young in- 

85 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

qnirer, as he stands upon the deck of an ocean 
steamer in the South Atlantic, and gazes, some- 
what listlessly, toward the nearest land in sight, 
which land, at the moment, happens to be the 
coast of Patagonia. 

^^Take this glass," answers his companion, 
handing him a powerful binocular, ^^and look 
closely at yonder promontory, and you will 
find your answer. ' ' 

His questioner directs his glass toward the 
coast-line indicated, looks steadily, and after a 
moment answers, ^^I see nothing." 

^^Nothing?" 

^^ Nothing except— stop a moment! I see 
two figures, one of them a naked savage ges- 
ticulating with considerable violence, and the 
other, another savage wearing a breech-cloth 
in which arrows are stuck, and carrying a bow. 
He raises one hand, from time to time, in a 
deprecatory or defensive gesture. But what of 
it?" 

^^What of it, my dear friend? Can you not 
read that dialogue in the sign-language as 
clearly as though you heard the voices of yon- 
der bushmen? You ask what is a capitalist, 
and yonder is your answer. The gentleman 

86 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

with the bow and the arrows and the breech- 
cloth is a capitalist, and the other gentleman- 
is not." 

So far as I am aware, the definition of the 
foremost authorities in social or political 
economy does not substantially differ from 
this. Mr. John Stuart Mill, as perhaps you 
will remember, and other economists with him, 
when seeking a graphic expression of the 
source and service of capital, have called it 
^^ abstinence.'' In other words, one man con- 
sumes what he finds or traps (returning to the 
most primitive conditions of life), and another 
abstains to a greater or less degree from con- 
suming, and exchanges what he has thus saved 
for food, a weapon, a tool, a fellow-man's ser- 
vice, or what you will ; and then, when he has 
thus acquired what another has wrought or 
found or captured, he becomes, whether it be 
bows and arrows and breech-cloths, or metals 
and machinery or manufactures, or their 
products in kind or in money, that he possesses, 
a capitalist. ' ' The flint arrow-heads, the stone 
and bronze utensils of fossiliferous origin, and 
the rude implements of agriculture, war, and 
navigation of which we read in Homer, were 

87 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

"the forerunners of that rich and wonderful 
display of tools, machines, engines, furnaces, 
and countless ingenious and costly appliances 
which represent so large a portion of the capi- 
tal of civilized countries, and without the pre- 
existing capital could not have been devel- 
oped." No progress can be made in any 
sphere, large or small, without reserved funds, 
possessed by a few or more persons, in small 
or large amounts, and ^ therefore capital is 
not a prerogative or monopoly of any class, 
but,'^ as Professor Cairnes, in his ^^Some 
Leading Principles of Political Economy,"^ 
has shown, ^^ embraces, both in its actual form 
and its future possibilities, all classes of men 
from the laborer to the millionaire. ' ' Still fur- 
ther, in the formula of M. Bastiat as given in 
his '^Harmonies of Political Economy," VII, 
^'In proportion to the increase of capital, the 
absolute share of the total product falling to 
the capitalist is augmented, and his relative 
share is diminished; while, on the contrary, 
the laborer's share is increased both absolutely 
and relatively. And, finally, capital and the 
capitalist, so far from being the antagonists, 

1 Part II, Chapter 3. 
88 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

are the allies of labor and tlie laborer, the 
indispensable means of all extended employ- 
ment and reward of labor, as well as of all 
increase of population and civilized well- 
being. ' ' ^ 

I do not need, however, to tell any one who 
hears me that any such definitions, whether of 
capital or the capitalist, as these, are held, by 
a considerable number of people to-day, to be 
alike false and misleading. They do not be- 
lieve that capital has been the due reward 
whether of abstinence or of ability. They do 
not believe that there are other rights in a ma- 
chine, though one man may have invented it 
and another worked it, than those of the man 
that works it. They disown any doctrine that 
maintains that there is any other capital than 
labor, and affirm that the whole product of 
labor belongs to the laborer, and none of it to 
him who furnished him with his task, the ma- 
terial in which he delves, or the tools with 
which he toils. ^^This then," says an author 
of the ^^ Fabian Essays," the manifesto of the 
English socialists, "is the economic analysis 
which convicts private property of being un- 

1 Cairnes, vide supra.. 

89 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

just, even from the beginning, and utterly im« 
possible as a final solution of even the individu- 
alistic aspect of the problem of adjusting the 
share of the worker, in the distribution of 
wealth, to the labor incurred by him in its 
production. All attempts yet made to con- 
struct true societies upon it have failed; the 
nearest things to societies so achieved have 
been civilizations, which have rotted into cen- 
tres of vice and luxury, and eventually have 
been swept away by uncivilized races. That 
our own civilization is already in an advanced 
stage of rottenness may be taken as statistically 
proved. That further decay instead of im- 
provement must ensue if the institution of pri- 
vate property be maintained is economically 
certain. ' ' 

That there are not alone reckless, unscru- 
pulous, and lawless men who believe this, and 
are ready, if they dared, to act upon their be- 
lief; but others, also, who view our present 
social problems with alarm, and look for their 
solution in the abolition of capital and the 
capitalist, there can be no doubt. They point 
with warning finger to the enormous growth 
of private fortunes and to the colossal expan- 

90 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

sion of corporate wealth. In both these they 
see a menace to our liberties, and an enemy to 
onr virtue; and some of them are almost as 
ready as the most fanatical anarchist in the 
land to lift the hand that would destroy them. 
For one, I would not minimize the dangers 
which they discern, or deny the tendencies 
which they distrust. Aggregations of force 
have always in them the element of peril, what- 
ever their nature or purpose. The storage of 
many billions of tons of water just above this 
beautiful city of yours, because you had reason 
to apprehend that the cutting off of the forests 
in the interior of your State would dry up the 
sources that now supply your great river, 
might be a wise and far-seeing precaution. 
But it could not be denied that it would create 
a distinct and menacing peril. Masonry ever 
so massive and costly will yield at length, un- 
less vigilantly watched and cared for; and so 
of other safeguards which, from the very na- 
ture of things, must needs be chiefly moral, 
which we oppose to the unscrupulous aggres- 
sions of vast aggregations of capital. The buy- 
ing of legislatures, the corruption of judges, 
the stealthy enervation, first of the forces that 

91 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

answer to our physical, and then to onr moral 
police, by systems of organized bribery and 
profit-sharing in connection with the most in- 
famous forms of vice and crime,— these are 
instances, tragic, and, alas ! as familiar as they 
are tragic, of what corporate wealth may do 
whether in the form of capitalized shares or 
capitalized cleverness. And jnst in propor- 
tion as a people as a whole becomes insensible 
to such perils as these, which may so easily 
threaten it through vast aggregations of capital 
capable of buying its way through senates as 
well as legislatures, does the danger grow more 
grave. That we are not more keenly sensitive 
to it; that we do not recognize, however skil- 
fully draped, the forms in which it menaces us ; 
that we are so often apparently so unconscious 
of its effects upon our own manners, habits, 
ideals, indulgences, aims, and aspirations, is, 
in one view of it, one of the most pathetic notes 
in our present situation. To live in an atmo- 
sphere of miasmatic poison, and not know that 
we are inhaling its deadly vapors ; to have our 
highest standards of simplicity and frugality 
steadily enervated by an environment of lux- 
ury and self-indulgence; to behold our youth 

92 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

of both sexes becoming daily more exacting in 
their requirements in these directions, and 
more discontented if they are denied them; to 
trace in men's homes and women's dress the 
tokens of a wanton prodigality of expenditure 
as essentially licentious as it is vulgar ; and to 
have all this heralded, week after week, month 
in and month out, by a still more vulgar press, 
whose tawdry and meretricious illustrations 
will be the horror, I hope, of future generations 
as they disinter them from the rubbish heaps 
of their past,— all this, verily, is dreary and 
disheartening enough. But make no mistake 
about it, it is neither the fault nor the fruit of 
the existence whether of the capitalist or of 
capital. 

And to see this it is only necessary to turn 
our attention for a moment to the substitutes 
for our present condition of things which are 
proposed. Capital has various forms: it may 
be money, or machinery, or land, or bonds and 
stocks. A favorite theory for the solution of 
our great disparities and our often injustices, 
as by some they are believed to be, to the la- 
borer as distinguished from the capitalist, is 
the annihilation of the private ownership, e,g,, 

93 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

of land, and so it has been proposed to abolish 
this private ownership, and to divide up the 
land among all the people. I shall not concern 
myself, now, with the equity of such a proce- 
dure, but simply with its results. Let us take 
as an example the country in which, coinci- 
dently with a relatively dense population and 
narrow boundaries, there have been supposed 
to be the largest areas of unimproved or 
unoccupied land held by a few wealthy own- 
ers,— I mean Great Britain. ^'In the minds 
of most of our extreme reformers," says Mr. 
W. H. Mallock in his '^Labour and the Popular 
Welfare,''^ ^'the income of the landlords fig- 
ures as something limitless ; and the landlords 
themselves as the representatives of all luxury. 
It is not difficult to account for this. To any 
one who studies the aspect of any of our rural 
landscapes, with a mind at all occupied with the 
problem of the redistribution of wealth, the 
things that will strike his eye most, and remain 
uppermost in his mind, are the houses and 
parks and woods belonging to the large land- 
lords. Small houses and cottages, though he 
might see a hundred of them in a three-mile 

1 Pp. 41-42, 

94 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

drive, he would hardly notice ; but if, in going 
from York to London, he caught glimpses of 
twelve large castles, he would think that the 
whole of the Great Northern Railway was lined 
with them. And from impressions derived 
thus two beliefs have arisen,— first that the 
word ^landlord' is synonymous with ^ large 
landlord'; and secondly, that large landlords 
own most of the wealth of the kingdom." 
Well, what are the facts? ^^If we take the 
entire rental— of the whole country— derived 
from land and compare it with the profits de- 
rived from trade and (invested) capital, we 
shall find that, so far as mere money is con- 
cerned, the land offers the most insignificant 
instead of the most important question that 
could engage us, and is, every year, in diamet- 
rical contradiction to the theories of Mr. Henry 
George, becoming more unimportant, as was 
some time ago pointed out by Professor Leone 
Levi, so that if all of it were divided in equal 
proportions to each adult in the whole nation, 
it would give each man about two pence a day, 
and each woman about three halfpence.'' 

^^Ah, yes," I hear some one say, ^^but we 
are not concerned about wealth and the accu- 

95 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

mnlations of capital in other conntries, but in 
our own. Granted for the moment that if it 
were possible to capitalize all the improved 
acres in our own land, it would yield no more 
than you have named, what will you say of 
those other enormous accumulations of wealth 
which are represented by mills and mines 
and factories, by railways and steamships and 
machinery, and by all the multiplied mecha- 
nisms of whose enormous profits we are from 
time to time hearing such amazing* reports ? ' ' 
Well, my brother, I should say, in the first 
place, that in nine out of ten of these cases it 
would be well to verify these reports, and that 
then, whenever you have been able to do that, 
it would be well, still further, to recognize the 
fact that the popular impression that the vast 
majority of this wealth is held by compara- 
tively a few persons is simply a grotesque de- 
lusion. To take a single instance which will 
answer for the whole, a careful statistician has 
lately shown ^ that the wage-earning classes, or 
those whose means do not exceed five hundred 
dollars per annum, own eight times as much 
of the wealth of the country as the multi-mil- 

1 ''The Laborer and the Capitalist/' Willey, p. 262. 
96 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

lionaires, fourteen times as much as the mil- 
lionaires, and, in a word, that the wealth of this 
class, which forms the basis and the over- 
whelming majority of those who compose our 
social structure, aggregates, to say the least, as 
much as all the several classes of the well-to-do, 
the rich, the very rich, and the phenomenal 
plutocrats put together. 

In a word, it often happens, as Mr. Henry 
Wood in his ^^ Political Economy of Human- 
ism"^ has admirably put it, that '^by senti- 
mental comparison there is a general feeling 
of relative poverty on account of existing great 
private fortunes. Men measure themselves 
among themselves. But no one is absolutely 
poorer, but rather richer, on account of exist- 
ing wealth, even though it be controlled by 
private ownership. Every social unit in the 
body politic is, at least indirectly, better off for 
general accumulation. It is the human stock 
in trade, and its lines extend indefinitely in all 
directions. ' ' 

It is a very common but inaccurate saying 
that ^Hhe rich are growing richer and the poor 
are growing poorer." A superficial view may 

1 Page 173. 

97 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

give such an impression, but any thorough re- 
search shows that the assertion that the poor 
are growing poorer can be proved to be false 
by actual statistics. 

Indeed it would be easy, if there were in this 
connection adequate opportunity for it, to go a 
step further; and though I cannot, because of 
these limits, now advance to that step, let me at 
least indicate the direction in which it would 
tend. Some one who has followed me thus far 
might interpose at this point, ' ' Very well, sup- 
pose that, for the sake of argument, one grants 
all that you have thus far urged, and acknow- 
ledges what wealth, whether in land or in other 
forms, in the hands of the few has done for 
the many. Will you deny that it would do a 
great deal more if, for the greater good, its 
administration were transferred from the 
hands of the few to the hands of the many? 
Or, in other words, if, instead of this monstrous 
disproportion between the wealth of a very 
few and the poverty of the many, all the land 
and stocks and bonds and ships and factories 
and railways, and all the rest of it, were put 
in one common purse and administered in pre- 
cisely equal proportions for the good of the 

98 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

whole number, would not that be feasible, 
would it not be equitable, would it not, remem- 
bering the example, in the book of the Acts 
of the Apostles, of those who sold houses and 
lands and laid the price of them at the apos- 
tles' feet, be scriptural and primitive and 
Christian r' Well, to take the last question 
first, that would depend upon whether such an 
incident was meant to be the disclosure of a 
social law for the kingdom of God, or simply 
a special provision for a special emergency. 
As to that question I have myself no smallest 
doubt. That Christ came to annihilate private 
property, in the sense in which any Christian 
man understands these words who recognizes 
that all that he holds he holds as a trust from 
God, I do not believe that there is the slightest 
warrant for maintaining. 

As to the other two questions there is no suf- 
ficient warrant for holding anything else than 
that there is an answer equally explicit. Would 
not, it is asked, this communism of property 
be equitable ? Most surely not. By what rule of 
equity are the industrious called upon to sur- 
render their earnings to the idle, the virtuous 
to the vicious, the temperate to the intemperate? 

99 

LcfC. 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

We talk about the poverty that there is in the 
land, and the hardship with which it bears upon 
the poor. My revolutionary friend, before you 
pull down the pillars of our existing social or- 
der, suppose you ask who is responsible for it ? 
Twenty years ago the money expended in the 
United States for liquor was $900,000,000 per 
annum. Would you care to trace that money 
to the pockets of the men who spent it, and 
learn who they were, and what difference their 
saving it would have made in their circum- 
stances? And, when you have communized all 
the wealth in the land, can you give me any en- 
couragement to believe that by that revolution 
you will have transformed human nature so 
as to make such a revolution an equitable 
thing ? 

But, as such considerations will have already 
suggested to you, they are practically super- 
fluous, because a social order based upon the 
annihilation of property means a reversion to 
barbarism. Beautiful as I know it has seemed 
to multitudes of good and pure minds, it is not 
a workable scheme. Let us look at it a moment 
and see why. 

That which has made civilization has been 
100 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

the service of mind. That which has created 
the opportunity for the works of genius has 
been a state of society which has not condemned 
all men equally to the same kinds of labor. But 
this is the essence of socialism. Not only must 
all work, but all must work substantially in the 
same way, at the same task, and the same hours. 
A clever writer has lately drawn for us the pic- 
ture of a modern socialistic community assem- 
bled for the purpose of determining what is 
necessary, useful, and productive labor. The 
majority of this community is made up, as in- 
evitably it must be, of precisely the same ma- 
terial as makes up the body of men who in a 
Pennsylvania or Virginia mining region make 
up a labor union. They are to vote as to what 
are the utilities of life. Do you suppose that 
the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the divine, 
would have any place among these ? Does such 
a constitution of human society promise for it 
anything else than food, and drink, and cloth- 
ing, and fuel? Do I task your imaginations 
very heavily in asking what such a community 
would say to you or me if we should say: 
^^No, you must excuse me from sawing wood 
or boiling potatoes. I think such powers as I 

101 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

have can be better employed in writing a poem, 
or painting a picture, which shall kindle in 
some other life the aspiration of noble living 
or heroic self-sacrifice." We know perfectly 
well that the answer would be : ^ ' My dear fel- 
low, you are ' off your base. ^ The only fire we 
want you to kindle is the kitchen fire, and the 
only painting that in this society you are called 
upon to do is the barn door!'' 

And, indeed, in a society so constituted there 
would be no resources with which to compen- 
sate the poet and the painter, the scholar and 
the man of science; for such a society, having 
annihilated capital and effaced all traces of 
our present social order, would have only such 
resources at its command as such a mechanism 
would produce. The accumulated wealth of 
the land would all be distributed per capita to 
individuals, and all business, manufactures, 
transportation, and the like would be carried 
on by the government. If any one anticipates 
that such a system of doing the business of a 
nation would leave it anywhere but increasingly 
in debt, he has only to study the conduct of one 
large department of business conducted, as we 
are bound to believe, by the cleverest nation 

102 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

under the sun : I mean the American post-office 
department, which is conducted annually and 
habitually at a dead loss, and of which capital, 
in the form of taxes, annually makes up the 
deficit. 

And so our modern civilization will be wise 
to recognize the fact that it cannot dispense 
with either capital or the capitalists. Your 
question and mine is rather the question: 
AYhat should be the attitude of the citizen, as 
one recognizing his civic stewardship, to this 
element in our social structure and life? It 
is one, it is well for us to remember, which in 
the final analysis stands on precisely the same 
level as many another thing concerning which 
we have never thought it worth while to raise 
any such questions as those to which I have re- 
ferred. In a word, capital is stored forces and, 
as such, falls under substantially the same law 
as any other stored force. The forces of na- 
ture—water, fire, electricity, and compressed 
air— may be stored forces; and, as such, as it 
may easily be seen, may be dangerous forces. 
I have already employed one of them in illus- 
tration of what I believe to be a sound philo- 
sophic position with reference to the whole 

103 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

question, but I might as readily have employed 
any other. Indeed, the familiar proverb, ^'Fire 
and water are good servants but bad masters," 
succinctly states the whole case, and is just as 
true of capital. In the case of great accumula- 
tions of any natural force, mere aggregation 
may become dangerous because, with the 
growth of accumulation, whether it be the ac- 
cumulation of water or the storage of elec- 
tricity, the possibilities of mischief from their 
unrestrained action are almost infinitely in- 
creased with the increase of volume. 

And so it may be said, and said with truth, 
that great accumulations of capital may easily 
be, under certain conditions, a menace to so- 
ciety. They make it possible for the unscru- 
pulous strong to buy, corrupt, or crush the 
timid weak. They make it possible for vast 
organizations— it is not of the smallest conse- 
quence whether we call them corporations, 
^ trusts", ^^ combines," or ^^ corners "—to cre- 
ate fictitious values, on the one hand, and to 
destroy those that are real on the other. They 
make it easy, often, to produce a fictitious 
scarceness of the necessaries of life where 
there is none, and practically to annihilate 

104 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

values when weaker men refuse to yield to their 
decrees. And so there has come to pass, more 
than once in the business world, substantially 
such a situation as a clever and accurate mind 
among ourselves has lately shown to be not at 
all unlikely in the wider realni of the world's 
politics. In a striking essay,^ published not 
long ago, Mr. Brooks Adams points out that, 
practically within the last decade, the indus- 
trial relations of the United States to the rest of 
the civilized world have been wholly revolu- 
tionized, and that the republic is now marching 
with giant strides toward the almost universal 
industrial conquest of the whole of Europe. 
But I will let this brilliant and cogent writer 
speak for himself. ' ' Between 1897 and 1901, ' ' 
he says, ^'the average excess of American ex- 
ports over imports has risen to $510,000,000 
yearly. The amount tends, for excellent rea- 
sons, to increase. Just now America can under- 
sell Europe in agricultural products; she can 
likewise undersell Europe in minerals as raw 
material; she can undersell Europe in most 
branches of manufactured iron and steel, be- 

1 '' Reciprocity or the Alternative^^ — " The Atlantic Monthly " 
August, 1901. 

105 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

sides many minor classes of wares. On tlie 
present basis, there seems to be no reason to 
doubt that, as time goes on, America will drive 
Europe more and more from neutral markets, 
and will, if she makes the effort, flood Europe 
herself with goods at prices with which Euro- 
peans cannot compete. Should the movement 
of the next decade correspond to the movement 
of the last, Europe will, at its close, stand face 
to face with ruin.'' 

Does this sagacious observer believe that 
Europe will acquiesce in any such catastrophe ? 
Not in the smallest degree. And the essay 
from which I have quoted is mainly an argu- 
ment to prove that, forced to face such an issue, 
Europe will resort to one of two alternatives— 
reciprocity treaties or war; and he then pro- 
ceeds to point out how extremely dubious, so 
far as our future prosperity or even survival 
as a world-power is concerned, the latter of 
these alternatives would be, should we decline 
the former; since, to mention only a single 
item in the problem, the United States, with its 
long and practically utterly defenceless coasts, 
has 520,000 tons of war-ships; and France, 

106 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

Germany, and Russia, 2,893,000 (practically 
three million) tons of war-ships ! 

The value of the whole argument in its rela- 
tion to that with which I am now concerned lies 
just here, that, just as nations have said from 
time to time all the way along and will continue 
to say to some one of their number, grown 
strong and great and powerful, ^^You shall not 
grow too strong, too great, too powerful ! ' ' and 
say it with the force of that mighty multitude 
that pulls down thrones and disrupts empires 
and disperses fleets and armies, just so that 
other mighty multitude, the people, will surely 
say to capital grown too great and powerful, 
^ ' Thus far shalt thou come and no farther ; and 
that thy power may no longer be a menacing 
giant or a corrupting cancer, we will see to it 
that, except as the common servant and com- 
mon possession of all the people owned in com- 
mon, employed in common, and dispensed in 
common, you shall exist no more. ' ' 

"Well, we have seen already what promise 
there is in any such reform, whether for the in- 
dividual or the state. Is there not, in dealing 
with this great problem, another and a better 

107 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

vfay ? It is here, my brothers, as I conceive, that 
your relation and mine to this whole question 
becomes apparent. There are two questions 
which, as it seems to me, the world has a 
right to ask of every rich man, and upon the 
answer to which should depend the recog- 
nition which he receives. And the first of these 
questions is : 

^^How did you get your money?" A large 
part of the wide-spread hostility to men of 
wealth takes its rise just here, and because of a 
wide-spread suspicion that many of the colossal 
fortunes of which one hears represent, on the 
part of those who have acquired them, nothing 
but cunning— sometimes dishonest, often un- 
scrupulous, and oftener still selfish and heart- 
less cunning. It is this fact, I am persuaded, 
which is, quite as often as otherwise, at the 
bottom of that stern challenge of the working 
man as he looks at the capitalist. ^^What I 
have, meagre as it is, I worked for, and it is the 
product of my labor; but you— what toil have 
you given that entitles you to returns so tre- 
mendously disproportioned to mine, or indeed, 
to any return at all? You are not a laborer, 
but an idler." 

108 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

Now, Mr. Mallock lias shown in the volume 
from which I have already quoted ^ that there 
is, just here, a very common and a very grave 
confusion of ideas, based upon the notion that 
that only is labor which is manual or muscular ; 
whereas ^^ Human exertion as applied to the 
production of wealth is of two distinct kinds : 
Ability and Labor,— the former being essen- 
tially moral or mental exertion, and only inci- 
dentally muscular; the latter being mainly 
muscular, and only moral or mental in a com- 
paratively unimportant sense. This difference 
between them, however, though accidentally 
it is always present, and is what first strikes 
the observation, is not the fundamental differ- 
ence. 

^^The fundamental difference is of quite an- 
other kind. It lies in the following fact : That 
Labor is a kind of exertion on the part of the 
individual which begins and ends with each 
separate task it is employed upon, whilst 
Ability is a kind of exertion on the part of the 
individual which is capable of effecting simul- 
taneously the labor of an indefinite number of 
individuals, and thus of hastening or perfect- 

1 '* Labor and the Popular Welfare/' 
109 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ing the accomplishment of an indefinite number 
of tasks. ''^ 

Mr. Mallock might have put the difference 
much more strongly than this. It is a wild 
night at sea, and a seaman is lying out on the 
yard-arm, striving to reef a huge sail which 
threatens, before he can secure it in its place, 
to tear him from his perch and fling him to the 
waves. Below him, on the bridge, stands the 
commander of the vessel, thundering his quick, 
sharp commands in swift and close succession ; 
and then, when the emergency is ended, hand- 
ing his speaking-trumpet to the subordinate 
who stands beside him and going to his cabin 
and his berth. ^ ' That man, ' ' thinks the sailor, 
^ ' is paid $250 per month for his work, and I am 
paid $20, and which of us works the hardest?'^ 
Could the seaman follow his commander to his 
pillow he would find out. When he himself 
has finished his watch, and crawled down into 
his berth, does he give the ship, for the time 
being, another thought! But how is it with 
the commander? 

And this question we may ask with equal fit- 

1 ^^ Labor and tlio Popular Welfare," W. H. Mallock, 
pp. 145-146. 

110 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

ness concerning those captains of industry, of 
greater and lesser degree, who plan and organ- 
ize and foresee and forecast; and without 
whose labors, not of eight hours a day, but of 
fourteen or eighteen often, there would be no 
ships to sail, nor mines to delve, nor factories 
to run, nor tasks for the vast majority of work- 
ing men to do at all. If such men are paid 
more than the day-laborer, it is because— let us 
not hesitate in the most explicit terms to say 
so— they have earned more. 

But it is quite another question with which 
we are confronted when we have to do with that 
class of capitalists whose manipulations of 
values have essentially no quality that is dif- 
ferent from the legerdemain of a card-sharper, 
and whose directorial chicanery in connection 
with great corporations is one of the deepest 
stains upon our modern commercial and finan- 
cial honor. Let me be explicit here, and clear 
myself, if I may, from the charge of mere 
rhetorical exaggerations. I claim that the capi- 
talist with whom honest men can hold no honest 
converse is he, e.g.^ who, being a manager or 
director or stockholder in some particular cor- 
poration,— 

111 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

(a) By manipulation of the stock market, in 
collusion with certain others like himself in the 
secret, artificially depresses values to the hurt 
and loss of fellow-investors; or who, 

(b) Being in the direction of some vast cor-, 
poration, railway, mining, or other, withholds 
regular reports, statements, and information 
for his own personal advantage ; or who, 

(c) Employs complicated, intricate, and ob- 
scure systems of bookkeeping which, though 
not technically fraudulent, deceive or mislead 
those who have a right to truthful and accurate 
information. 

No one who hears me can be ignorant of the 
fact that by methods such as these great for- 
tunes have been made, and are being made, of 
which it is sufficient to say that they do not hon- 
estly belong to their possessors. 

A much wider field is opened, however, as 
to wealth unjustly acquired, and vast fortunes 
wrung from the hand of toil, in connection with 
the history of the matter of wages and the 
modes of paying them; the homes of laboring 
people owned by great manufacturing corpora- 
tions; the rents that have been extorted for 
them; and the horrible conditions in which 

112 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

those who were forced to live in them were com- 
pelled to exist. They are facts such as these 
that we are called to remember when we regard, 
as great multitudes of people do, the embittered 
and resentful attitude of the working classes as 
fanatical or unreasonable. A writer who saw 
them, and who has placed on record the story 
of what he found, quotes this as the official rec- 
ord taken from a report of the State Board of 
Health as to the laborers' homes in what he 
describes as the most advanced State of the 
Union— Massachusetts : ^'In a single building 

in the town of W , thirty-two feet long, 

twenty wide, three stories high, with attics, 
habitually exist thirty-nine people of all ages. 
For their common use there is one pump and 
one privy, within twenty feet of each other, 
with the drainage of the several sinks of the 
house discharging near by. The windows are 
without weights, and the upper sashes are im- 
movable. No other provision is made for fresh 
air. Scores of similar overcrowded and un- 
cleanly tenements exist and could be cited. 
It is well attested," continues the report, 
' ' that there commonly exist, in connection with 
the homes of the laboring classes everywhere, 

113 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

filthy and insufficient privies, with overflowing 
vaults, unhinged doors, and rotten floors ; cess- 
pools, sink-drains, and sewers, broken or sur- 
charged, the foul discharges permeating the 
soil in the immediate vicinity of wells and cis- 
terns; cellars where dampness and decay are 
doing a constant work of death, and yet are 
often inhabited; enclosures made pestilential 
by the causes mentioned and pig-pens and gar- 
bage tubs; while stairs and passageways are 
carpeted and draped with dirt of every na- 
ture.'' And then, by way of fastening the 
people who live in such houses, and who work 
for the corporations by which they are owned, 
in an iron bondage to their employers, there 
has been devised what is known as the truck 
system. '^It is a common thing," says the 
author of '' Wealth and Progress," ^4n the 
manufacturing centres, even in the Eastern 
States, to find a large per cent, of the laborers 
practically in a state of pawn to the corpora- 
tion for which they work. The tenements in 
which they live, the store at which they trade, 
as well as the factory in which they work, are 
all, directly or indirectly, in the hands of the 
employer. 

114 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

^^By this means the store-book and the pay- 
roll are made to keep pace with each other, and 
a large per cent, of the laborers scarce ever 
receive a dollar in money, often being perma- 
nently in debt to the corporation, for which the 
latter holds a mortgage on their household 
effects ! Thus the laborers are tethered to the 
spot, unless they go forth as tramps, leaving 
their furniture behind them, or, as is commonly 
the case, steal away in the night. ''^ And yet 
we say that we have no slavery in the land, and 
resent as a grotesque exaggeration the applica- 
tion of the term ^^ white slave.'' 

Let me make haste to add that I am perfectly 
well aware of what some one may, perhaps, an- 
grily seek to interject at this point; namely, 
that I am describing a condition of things 
which, whether in Massachusetts or anywhere 
else, has largely ceased to be, and which appro- 
priate legislation has, to-day, made largely im- 
possible. Undoubtedly this is true, and we 
may well thank God and a few brave men and 
women for it ; but the dreary fact which makes 
what I have recited still pertinent to this whole 
discussion is, that reform in this awful business 

1 '^Wealth and Progress," George Gunton, pp. 367-369. 

115 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

was not instituted by the capitalist or the stock- 
holder ; and that, as a rule, changes were made 
and conditions were bettered, not by the spon- 
taneous action of the people who hired the 
workmen and drew the dividends, but by 
others who were, as a rule, wholly outside of 
the whole business, and to whose insistent de- 
mands, backed by legal authority, mill-owners 
and stocldiolders only tardily and reluctantly 
surrendered. 

And so I maintain that the primary ques- 
tions to be addressed to the capitalist always 
and everywhere are : 

1. Where did such wealth as you are in con- 
trol of come from ? How was it made ? Whom 
did the making of it rob or wrong? What 
claim have you upon the respect of honest men, 
or to the companionship of decent people, until 
you can answer these questions? 

2. And then, next to these, comes the equally 
pertinent question, which it should be the office 
of a wholesome and rightly constituted society, 
but most of all of that divine society which we 
call the kingdom of God in the world, to press : 
^^What are you going to do with it?^^ 

116 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

To that question, ordinarily, there are three 
distinct answers : 

1. The first of these, to put it in its coarsest 
and commonest form, would be, ^^I am going 
to enjoy myself— I am going to have a good 
time. I am going to gratify wants which I have 
in common with my kind, which I see being 
gratified about me on every hand, without stint 
and in every form"; and, says the modern po- 
litical economist of a certain type, ^^I am going 
to do this because it is not only agreeable to me, 
but good for the community. You may inveigh 
against extravagance, luxurious expenditure, 
prodigality in dress or equipage, in palaces or 
in jewels, as much as you please, but a sound 
political economy will demonstrate that without 
luxury there is no art, and that without profuse 
expenditure just so much less is distributed 
among those who toil or combine to supply 
the demands of such expenditure. ' ' The ques- 
tion introduced here, as you will realize, is 
really large enough for a volume in itself ; and 
to those who would peruse it in detail— and 
there never was an age which more urgently 
demanded that the whole subject should be 

117 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

probed to its foundations— I would commend 
the admirable treatise by Emile de Laveleye, 
which, because it is the work of one of a nation 
that, more than any other, at any rate in mod- 
ern times, has contributed to the deification 
and spread of luxury, is all the more competent 
to estimate and discuss the whole question.^ 
Says M. de Laveleye in stating the question at 
issue: ^^A financier and an economist of the 
last century held entirely different opinions on 
this subject. ^I maintain, for my part,' said 
the financier, Hhat it is luxury which up- 
holds states.' ^Yes,' replied the economist, 
^just as the executioner upholds the hanged 
man.' " There could not well be a more 
comprehensive statement of the whole case. 
The spectacle of a hanged man is of value only 
in so far as it shows what may wisely be 
avoided. 

And the reasons for such avoidance ought 
not to be far to seek. If it were attempted to 
be maintained that the prevalence of luxury 
promoted traffic, stimulated art, circulated 
money, and the like, the obvious question must 
be. How far are any, or all, of these ends a suf- 

1 ** Luxury/^ by Emile de Laveleye, London, 1891. 
118 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

ficient warrant for the production of effects 
concerning which, as far as the great mass of 
human society is concerned, there is absolutely 
no debatable ground. Of the effect of luxury 
upon those who indulge in it the pages of his- 
tory, from the time of Heliogabalus down and 
on, are full. As enervating character, as de- 
bauching morals, as threatening— nay, destroy- 
ing—the purity of the family and the integrity 
of the individual, there is no other single influ- 
ence that can surpass it, if there is any that can 
equal it. Ask any experienced worker among 
lost and outcast women what, in the case of 
young girls, has been most productive in induc- 
ing those awful lapses that consist in the pros- 
titution of the human body, and they will tell 
you what madness seizes upon the young when 
the lust of personal display is appealed to by a 
gold brooch or a pair of diamond earrings. 
And when you have constituted a social order 
in which these things are the prizes of the high- 
est; when you have filled your current litera- 
ture with portraits and descriptions which are 
continually dwelling upon and apostrophizing 
it; when, in one word, you have made a life 
in which these things are the much coveted 

119 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

and idolized popular ambitions, the ques- 
tion must needs come straight home to every 
man and woman among us, ^ ' If I have wealth, 
how far am I warranted in indulging this craze, 
in feeding this passion, whether in myself or 
others, or in using great expenditure, in what- 
ever form, to promote the creation of a stan- 
dard by which no good end is served, and every 
bad and base passion inflamed and stimu- 
lated?" I am entirely willing to admit every 
word that can be said in behalf of luxury as 
the promoter of art: but when it has all been 
said, what answer can one make to these words 
written, not by some austere and ascetic hand, 
but by Ernest Renan, a Frenchman first, and 
not a Christian at all. ^^The mistake," says 
Renan, ' ' lies not in proclaiming industry to be 
good and useful, but in attaching too much 
importance to the pursuit of perfection in cer- 
tain details. In minor matters, once a good 
thing has been produced, it is little worth while 
to improve upon it indefinitely. For, if the aim 
of human life is happiness, this has been very 
well realized in the past without these super- 
fluities; and if, as the wise think with good 
reason, it is moral and intellectual grandeur 

120 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

which alone is necessary, these accessories con- 
tribute very little to it. History affords us ex- 
amples of high intellectual attainments and a 
golden age of happiness which have been 
reached by men whose material state was crude 
enough. The Brahmins in India, while still 
living, as far as exterior civilization was con- 
cerned, on the level of the most backward so- 
cieties, attained an order of philosophical specu- 
lation which Germany alone, in our days, has 
been able to surpass. The ideal of the Gospel 
[think of this from Eenan!], unique and un- 
surpassable, in which the moral sense is 
wrought out with the most marvellous delicacy, 
takes us into the midst of a life as simple as 
that of our rural solitudes, a life in which the 
complication of exterior things finds but little 
place. Far from the progress of art running 
parallel with the progress made by any nation 
in the tastes for the comforts of life, we may 
say without paradox, that those times and those 
countries in which the comforts (and luxuries) 
of life have become the main object of society, 
have been the least highly gifted in the things 
of art. "1 

1 Kenan, '^Essays on Morals and Criticism." 
121 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

2. ^'But again,'' the modern capitalist may 
declare, '^I have no ambition for accumulated 
wealth to spend it in display, but I do desire it 
to relieve myself and those nearest me from 
labor and indigence. I want a handsome com- 
petence for myself, and enough to provide the 
same for my children." It would be interest- 
ing to ask such an one what is his conception 
of a ^^ handsome competence." It has lately 
been authoritatively declared that, in our chief 
American city, no one can live on less than one 
hundred thousand dollars a year! To secure 
this he must have for himself a capital of 
at least two and a half millions; and as much 
for each of his children. And when it is se- 
cured, what will be its effect upon him and 
upon them? ^'Believed of the necessity of 
painful effort, ' ' such a man first, and still more 
his children, ^^will undergo only such efforts 
as are easy; so the habit of hard work disap- 
pears, and with it the zest of enjoyment which 
the reaction from hard work brings. The 
higher kinds of concentrated mental effort, 
with their corresponding enjoyments, go first; 
then the lower ; even the physical exercises, in- 
volving still constant practice and play of 

322 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CAPITALIST 

mind, yield/' as the author of ^^The Social 
Problem" has put it;^ ^^and the independenc 
gentleman, as he styles himself, becomes a so- 
cial parasite, an idler in the school of life, 
and sooner or later, if not a degenerate, a 
' detrimental, ' mischievous, obnoxious, and alto- 
gether incongruous with a healthy human so- 
ciety/' 

3. But, finally, it may be said by the capital- 
ist : '^ No, I do not want wealth for any of these 
things ; I want it for power. I see that it can 
buy not only pleasure but influence, not only 
splendor but precedence, not only dogs and 
horses but legislatures and senates, and I want 
to be a man of power. ' ' 

Alas, that there should be so much of truth 
in such declarations! But in them you and I 
see the supreme danger of capital to our time. 
It is an age, in a sense never before reached, 
I apprehend, in the republic, of purchasable 
men; and whole civic communities are nowa- 
days said to be owned and administered, so far 
as both the law-making and executive mecha- 
nisms of society are concerned, by the capital- 
ists. I am thankful to believe for myself that 

1 ^'The Social Problem," p. 116. 
123 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

such a statement is an exaggeration, but it 
points to our common danger and it calls you 
and me to our common duty. Great forces are 
dangerous. Do not covet them. Do not cringe 
to them; but, most of all, realize that a right 
estimate of the duties of citizenship calls on it 
to seek how to disarm and control them. 



!24 



IV 

THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

I AM to speak to you finally, of the Citizen 
and the Consumer. And the conjunction, 
obviously, must be copulative and not anti- 
thetical. One can imagine a listener, who has 
followed us thus far in this discussion, as 
saying to him^self, ''Well, all this is more or 
less interesting and curious, but it has nothing 
to do directly with me. I cannot be grouped 
with either of the great classes referred to in 
it, and I may leave the questions involved in 
that academic realm in which, so far as I am 
concerned, they both largely belong.'' 

But, my brother, you cannot do that when it 
comes, in our modern social mechanism, to the 
duties and responsibilities of the consumer. 
There you cannot put yourself outside of dis- 
tinct and personal responsibility. No matter 
how modest your consumption, you are never- 
theless a consumer. The citizen cannot be a 

125 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

citizen without being a consumer as well. In 
fact, if such were not the case the whole indus- 
trial fabric crumbles into ruin. 

The capitalist and the working man alike 
imply, by an inevitable necessity, the consumer. 
They do not exist for themselves alone; and, 
if left to themselves, would equally perish. The 
capitalist must find somewhere the fields that 
invite the activities whether of his mills or his 
bank accounts ; and the working man depends, 
in the final analysis, for his daily wage upon 
the consumer who purchases the products or 
utilizes the mechanisms which his labor has 
produced. It is an impressive thought, when 
you buy your ticket and go on board an ocean 
steamer, what a vast series of causes and ef- 
fects you have helped to set in operation, 
reaching down at last to some forge-fire, or the 
subterranean depths of some coal-mine, that 
you will never see and have never dreamed of. 

But when this is said, there is a class of 
teachers who have held that all has been said 
that could be said. In other words, what has 
been called, and I think on the whole justly, 
though of late in certain quarters the name has 
been repudiated, the '^Manchester School" of 

12G 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

political economists have maintained that, in 
regard to the various questions of supply and 
demand, the conditions on which they depend, 
the problems which they involve, and the ef- 
fects, especially upon wage-earners, which thej 
produce, the consumer, as such, has no con- 
cern, and need charge himself with no respon- 
sibility. And this is not at all, let me say, 
because of any deliberate indifference or in- 
humanity upon the part of the capitalist or 
employer who holds such opinions, but because 
he himself, equally with the wage-earner, is, 
as he holds, the subject of certain inexorable 
laws of supply and demand, which must oper- 
ate because of inexorable conditions behind 
them, and with which mere benevolence is 
powerless to interfere. 

The growth of such a doctrine is not difficult 
to trace, nor the causes which produced it. 
They are, in one word, the result of what I 
have already elsewhere described as the great 
industrial revolution of the last century. Mr. 
Hobson, in his ' ' Social Problem, ' ' has pointed 
out four great changes which the industrial 
revolution brought about, the influence of which 
upon the constitution and problems of modern 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

society is as yet only imperfectly recognized. 
To one of these I liave already referred in an- 
other connection, in indicating the changes, 
tremendous in their effects upon the business 
of the world and upon the individual worker, 
of the introduction into the domains of 
manufacture, transportation, and the like of 
machinery. One of these changes involved al- 
together new demands upon the working man ; 
new conditions in the performance of personal 
service; and new restrictions in the area of 
personal activities and contacts. If you would 
understand what I mean, consider, e.^., the 
daily life of a man who at the beginning of the 
last century worked at a loom, and at the end 
of it worked in a factory. In the former case, 
the loom was ordinarily in his own house, the 
material was of his own purchase, and the 
product, whether for wear or for sale, was his 
own property. Did you ever linger in his shop 
and watch and talk to an old-fashioned shoe- 
maker? Did you ever discover how much 
shrewd wisdom, how much sound (as well as 
sometimes very unsound) philosophy he had 
hammered out of his lapstone? Did you ever 
follow him matching, measuring, piecing, 

128 



i 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

paring his material until, as you noted step 
by step of his progress, you found yourself 
arrested and fascinated by its cleverness, its 
resource, its variety, its final triumph in com- 
plex achievement? Such a worker, remember 
now, was a type of the great body of workers 
not a great while ago ; and, constant and assidu- 
ous as might be his labor, it had in it the ele- 
ments of contrivance, of variety, and, best of 
all, of coincident human contacts, relaxing to 
the mind, stimulating to the curiosity, and 
more or less satisfying to the social instincts. 
Now then, go from such an one to a great fac- 
tory where a thousand men are employed. 
There are social contacts there, if by such a 
term you mean the neighborhood of other 
figures in the vast and thunderous and inexora- 
ble mechanism. But it never pauses, nor they ; 
it never speaks to them, and they rarely or 
never to one another ; it affords to the cleverest 
craftsman among them all only a fixed routine, 
invariable, determinate, and unyielding. He 
must adjust his movements to it; it will not 
alter its for him. If he follows all day long 
in stolid and slavish obedience, it will do its 
task, which is his. If he gets in its way, it will 

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THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

still crash onward in blind and relentless 
fury, and sometimes it will kill him. This is 
the relation of the working man to the machine. 
But another element in our modern indus- 
trial situation is the result of the demands of 
the machine. 'When the capitalist has discov- 
ered that he can make a thousand axes a day 
instead of a dozen, he must straightway set 
about finding a market for them ; and when, by 
the extension of commerce and the opening of 
new countries and the promotion of free trade, 
he has succeeded in creating a demand not only 
for one thousand but for ten thousand axes a 
day, he must bend and drive and crowd the 
laborers that produce them. And here we come 
upon one of the most revolutionary influences 
that have touched our modern life. For, as 
commerce and manufactures pushed each other 
farther and farther afield; as, in other words, 
the demand of new mechanisms and new mar- 
kets grew and widened, they ended in devouring 
not merely men and women, but children. One 
of the most tragic pages in the history of mod- 
em industrialism is that which is concerned 
with the exploiting of child labor— of boys in 
mines, and of girls in factories, etc. Happily, 

130 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

in those cases where it was most eagerly 
undertaken, it has at length, though tardily, 
been limited and, in some measure, regulated 
by law. But the children who, when they came 
out of the factory at the end of their day's 
or half a day's work, were so exhausted that 
the food prepared for them had sometimes 
to be put in their mouths, were but one illustra- 
tion of a situation whose horrors those of sla- 
very, in lands where slavery has existed, never 
exceeded, if on the whole they ever matched. 

And, for a long time, the state of the worker 
both in this country and in England was no 
better, not only in regard to children, but to 
women; and concerning these, under circum- 
stances, and with elements of shameful bru- 
tality which, here, I may not name. In some 
respects these conditions have been amended; 
but in others they are, in our great cities, as 
merciless, health-destroying a.nd soul-destroy- 
ing as they have ever been in any most 
crowded factory town in other lands. And men 
and women who directly or indirectly profit 
by the miseries of these poor creatures are, 
too widely, wholly indifferent to them. 

But still another result of this enormous in- 
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THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

'dustrial development has been the growth of 
huge and congested communities, and what has 
aptly been called the severance or weakening 
of the personal nexus (a) between employers 
and employed, and (&) between sellers and 
buyers. As to the former of these, no change 
which has come to pass in onr times has been 
in its nature more serious, or in its results 
more menacing. It may be stated as a general 
principle that there is no one thing which could 
contribute more effectually to the weakening 
and ultimate disintegration of society than the 
loss out of it of the personal element. How 
precious this is let me ask you to test out of 
your own experience. The ordinary contacts 
of the ordinary individual, who is not himself 
an employer of labor, with working men are 
oftener than otherwise in travel. Our great 
railway and waterway systems, all around the 
world, employ millions of men who— did it 
ever occur to you?— never, from first to last, 
come into contact with an employer. They 
come into contact, indeed, with underlings like 
themselves, who are in turn the creatures of a 
vast and relentless mechanism which is crying 
to them forever, like Dickens's policeman to 

132 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

the waif in the street, ^^Move on! move on!'' 
But, beyond that, their working life is a dull 
mechanical round from first to last, from day 
to day, from week to week. Try, now, when the 
opportunity comes to you, to touch one of these 
lives with your own, and you will be strangely 
unobservant or insensible if you do not find 
something responding to you, often with a 
startled surprise which is almost like a dead 
faculty coming to life again. The whole man, 
incased by routine, driven by corporate com- 
mands, number 549,871 if you please, finds to 
his delighted amazement that you are not reck- 
oning him in, after all, as no more than a mere 
cog in the wheel. And yet, as a matter of fact, 
the vast system of our industrial life has prac- 
tically reduced him to that. 

'^Well, what of it?" says the disciple of the 
Manchester doctrine. ^^What are you going to 
do about it? How are you going to remedy it? 
Really, if you hypersensitive people will stop 
and reflect about it you will see that your objec- 
tions to such a condition of things, your insist- 
ence that they are not to be endured, your 
demand that they shall be remedied, are just 
as essentially absurd as that of the passenger 

133 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

on shipboard who, having stood out on the 
forward deck in some searching and freezing 
northeaster, when the bleak and bitter winds 
were cutting him to the bone, should insist that 
the captain and the third officer, who were en- 
during the same hardships on the bridge above 
him, should come down with him and go to 
bed. Somebody must stay on the bridge. 
Some few must face the hardships of the storm, 
for the safety and comfort of all. Some lives 
must be sacrificed in mining coal and weaving 
cloth and welding iron. The commerce of the 
world cannot stand still. In all great enter- 
prises there is a certain element of necessary 
waste. In all successful enterprises somebody 
is sure to fall by the way ; but the column must 
move on." 

This policy in our industrial life has been 
baptized with many names : whatever they are, 
laissez faire^ necessarian, or the good of the 
greatest number, they are of the devil, and 
deserve, as Jesus did with devils, to be cast 
out. For when we come to trace the history 
of a great deal of our modern industrial enter- 
prise, the saddest note in it all is its note of 
a consistent indifferentism. Allowances were 

134 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

undoubtedly to be made in the beginning, when 
the whole situation was new, and its effects 
upon the individual worker imperfectly recog- 
nized. But the misery of it has been that, from 
first to last, what our great manufacturing or 
commercial interests have done for the wage- 
earner in the way of minimizing the hardships 
and, sometimes, the horrors of labor, has been 
done, as a rule,— I do not forget that there have 
been some splendid exceptions,— but as a rule, 
solely and only at the stern demand of the law. 
Somebody's attention has been arrested; at 
last somebody's sympathy has been touched; 
somebody's hot indignation has been aroused; 
and then at length, and too often slowly and re- 
luctantly, the needed relief has been provided. 
It is at this point, I entreat you to recognize, 
that there enters the responsibility of the con- 
sumer—and yours and mine therefore— in 
this whole situation. The theory of industrial 
economics to which I have referred says to 
those of us who are outside of its technical 
workings: ^^This is none of your business. 
You could not do anything if you would. The 
whole matter of the conditions of labor is gov- 
erned by inexorable laws, and first of all by the 

135 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

law of supply and demand, and yon are power- 
less to alter or amend them. Stand aside ! ' ' 

Well, the time has come to challenge that im- 
perious tone, and the consumer's business it is, 
I maintain, to do so. You will see, I trust, 
now, why I have led you by this long and, it 
may have seemed to some of you, extremely 
circuitous route to the point to which we have 
now come. Either the consumer has some re- 
sponsibility as to the conditions under which 
that which he consumes is produced, or he has 
not. To that question political economy— at 
any rate, political economy of the elder school- 
has a clear and explicit answer: He has not. 
' ^ Men of humane culture, ' ' as Mr. John A. 
Hobson has described them,^ ^^ smitten with 
social compunction, and hard-headed, self-edu- 
cated working men, have turned for light and 
leading to text-books of economic science, and 
have found darkness; have gone for bread, 
and have received the stones of arid, barren 
academic judgments. ^ ' Professors of economics 
resent this criticism and reply: ^'What you ask 
does not come withiii our province. You come 
saying, ' Prophesy unto us. ' Here is a mass of 

1 ''The Social Problem/' p. 18. 
136 




THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

unemployed people; tell us some safe way of 
utilizing their labor. Here is a deadlock be- 
tween labor and capital ; suggest fair terms of 
settlement." Of late the political economist 
has been in the habit of rubbing his hands in 
deprecating fashion and telling us, ^^ Political 
economy is a science; we are not practition- 
ers. " I do not affirm this of some of the great- 
est masters of the science of political economy 
such as Adam Smith, Mather, Ricardo, or, even 
later, of John Stuart Mill and Jevons ; but too 
often the teacher of political economy has been 
content to ^' tread delicately in the intricate 
mazes of historical research and currency, and 
to do much subtle theorizing about terminology 
and method,'' and to do no more. All this 
doubtless should be done, but not the other 
left undone. 

And here, therefore, I repeat, enters your 
responsibility and mine who are consumers. 
One of the first questions with which, in all 
our commercial transactions with our neighbor, 
we must needs be concerned is the question of 
cost. Not alone is such and such a thing use- 
ful or beautiful or agreeable to the taste or 
not, is, after all, very often the final question, 

137 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

but also the further question, '^What does it 
cost?" But that is plainly, as a little reflection 
must show us, a question which concerns not 
alone ourselves and the measure of our own re- 
sources, but, in another and really much higher 
sense of the term ^^cost,'' the producer or 
producers of the things offered to us. Whether 
or no we can command the money with which to 
purchase this or that or the other thing, is one 
question; whether we are willing, or, whether 
willing or not, whether we ought to incur the 
responsibility of purchasing it, and so encour- 
aging its continued production by our com- 
plicity in the business of its production, in utter 
and absolute indifference to the conditions of 
cost in its production in which are involved its 
producers, is quite another thing. Here, e.g.j 
is a pearl which a woman wears with others 
strung about her neck, and which has been ob- 
tained at almost priceless cost in some deep- 
sea soundings far away. To find it or some- 
thing like it, the diver took his life in his hand, 
and often lost it. If, now, this pearl were some 
precious remedy for a malignant and deadly 
disease, and the sacrifice of this one life could 
hope to secure the rescue from that disease of at 

138 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

least two others, straightway the question would 
assume a wholly different aspect. But when it is 
of no such use, nor any other, save for the pur- 
pose of mere personal adornment, if often at 
such appalling risks it represents nothing more 
than art can construct to-morrow with such ex- 
quisite skill and perfection as to deceive the 
most critical observer, then the sacrifice of life 
for such an end ought, I venture to submit, to 
make its vain and bedizened wearer, as she 
flaunts this prize, stained often with the life- 
blood of a fellow-creature, in the face of her 
less opulent sisters, at least occasionally some- 
what uncomfortable. 

And the tragedy of such an illustration is 
that it is but the parable, in little, of a whole 
situation of which our manufacturing indus- 
tries, all round the world, are the constant and 
deadly duplicate. I am trying to make you 
think, and not merely shiver, and so I shall 
not ask you to follow me along that long and 
ghastly pathway which runs through so many 
of our domestic industries that produce the 
things we wear, the things we eat and drink, 
the things with which we garnish our persons 
and our homes. But it must be known to most 

139 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

of us that there are whole groups of manufac- 
tures which, in their effect upon the worker, 
are simply deadly. The gases that he breathes, 
the poisons that menace the lungs and the 
blood, the tasks that can be performed only by 
the sacrifice ultimately of the eyes, or by the 
shattering of the nervous system, all these are 
enemies to the physical powers of the working 
man which are matters of common knowledge. 
And as we ascend above them to those 
conditions of our industrial life which are in- 
imical to his intellectual life, the case is even 
more serious. We have been busy for the last 
fifty years, and increasingly busy during the 
present generation, in widening the mental 
horizon of the wage-earner. Our system of 
popular education, on which we greatly pride 
ourselves as a glory of our American civiliza- 
tion, is in its extent and in the variety of its 
component parts a striking contrast to the pub- 
lic schools in which the majority of the Ameri- 
can people were reared half a century ago. 
The three R's included, then, the most of it. J 

But to-day, if we reckon in the higher depart- i 

ments of our public schools, the range of sub- J 

jects is all but collegiate in its extent and its i 

variety. Now it is an enormous enlargement of • 

140 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

the mental horizon which has come into the life 
of a youth who has been thus educated. 

But the inexorable conditions of modern life, 
as of that which from the beginning has pre- 
ceded it, ordain that the graduate or the pupil 
of this system, oftener than otherwise, earns a 
livelihood with his or her hands. Eager as 
those scientifically trained may be to turn their 
backs upon manual labor,— and the pathetic 
struggle to get away from it is one of the most 
painful and perplexing notes of modern life,— 
there is, after all, for the great majority no 
possible opportunity. If they had the aptitudes 
for other than manual labor, there are not, in 
the great majority of cases, the openings for 
it; and of those who find them a considerable 
proportion fall back, soon, to the level of the 
mere hand-worker, because, in spite of all their 
striving, they cannot bring themselves abreast 
of the average standard of remunerative com- 
petency. And all this is, in a sense, we say, 
and say rightly, as it should be. The tools to 
him who can use them. The task to him who 
can perform it. The release from the work of 
a day-laborer to the man who has something 
more than the capacity for only hand work. 

But what of him who has striven to rise 
141 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

above mere hand work, and has fallen back? 
He may own the justice of the verdict which 
decrees him, in the higher realms of life's 
tasks, an incapable; bnt, as he takes up the 
tasks which fall to him in some lower realm, 
he brings to them, nnfortunately for him, the 
tastes, the visions, at least the perceptions 
which have been wakened in him by his earlier 
and ampler culture. And he cannot strangle 
these. If your ear has been educated to distin- 
guish in music a harmony from a discord; if 
your eye has been trained to discern the differ- 
ence between true and false proportions; if 
your mind, in one word, has been taught to 
know, however imperfectly, the delights of 
those intellectual companionships which, as you 
move among them with some choice volume in 
your hand, make you conscious for a little while 
that you are communing with the world's best, 
can you forget all that, and, because your place 
and your task are lowly ones, make yourself as 
though all the other had never been? Let him 
who has tried it answer that question, for no 
one else can. 
When the question of shortening the hours 
142 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMEE 

of labor is raised, I hear men speak of it, some- 
times, with a tone of almost savage resentment : 
^^ Eight hours for a man's working day!" 
it is said. ^^Why not make it four or two at 
once? How mnch farther is this unscrnpnlous 
pressure for the abbreviation of the working 
day to go? What is to become of our indus- 
tries, our commerce, our productive capacity, 
in competition with other nations, if you con- 
tinue to advance in this direction? Do you not 
see that demands so unreasonable as those 
which are now being made by the working man 
and his friends menace the whole foundations 
of our industrial and commercial prosperity, 
and threaten to leave us a bankrupt nation, with 
no money to pay the working man or anybody 
else? Will you brush these questions, which 
are fundamental to the whole business, aside, 
as if they were of no consequence, and persist 
in a course of utterly Utopian revolution?'' 

No; for myself, at any rate, I answer, I 
would brush no one of these questions aside, 
nor underestimate their substantial impor- 
tance. There is, undoubtedly, a point beyond 
which you cannot reduce the hours of labor 

143 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

without danger to that for which, and by which, 
labor itself exists. The question is undoubtedly 
one which needs to be dealt with in a spirit of 
careful scrutiny, and upon the basis of a wide 
generalization of demonstrable facts. But be- 
hind it rise other questions which are inter- 
woven with it, and on which finally (to urge no 
higher motive for considering them) the endur- 
ing efficiency of the working man depends. I 
shall not attempt here to deal with the problem 
of the practical abbreviation as it relates to the 
question of the adequate and economical prod- 
uct of a day's labor or of the laborers' working 
hours. But this at least is certain: there must 
be, if you are to have, in connection with any 
task on earth, an effective workman, time for 
something else, and more, than work and eating 
and sleeping. Such a life sooner or later makes 
of a man an imbecile or a brute. Such a life 
drives a man to drink as straight and surely, 
oftentimes, as if you or I, when his day's work 
was done, led him with our own hands to the 
rum-shop, where he snatched the one little frag- 
ment of change and excitement which his whole 
life affords. And for such a life, just in so far 
as he connives at it, or tolerates it, or is par- 

144 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

taker of the cheapened frnits of it, without 
protest or denunciation, the consumer is re- 
sponsible. 

But man is not made up of body and mind 
only. The image of God in him is his moral 
nature, and the rescue or ruin of this is of in- 
comparably more consequence than anything 
that can befall his carcass or his mere reason. 
For these may perish here, and yet the nobler 
part of man survive beyond. And so, when 
we are brought face to face with the influence 
of modern industrialism upon the souls of those 
who are the subjects of it, the situation is, of 
all the others, the most grave. What is it? 
Well, the history of factory towns for the last 
fifty years, in both hemispheres, is the answer 
to that question. It is a matter for profound 
thankfulness that, owing often to the heroic 
efforts of a few devoted men and women, these 
conditions are so much better than, for a long 
time, they were : but that the promiscuous herd- 
ing of men and women, boys and girls, in de- 
grading and grossly indecent proximity; the 
exposure of the young and uncorrupted to 
tainting and corrupting intimacies with the de- 
bauched and demoralized; the gross disregard 

145 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

of the most elementary conditions of refine- 
ment and decorum, in sanitary provisions that 
were simply and horribly barbaric; and the 
wholly unlicensed prevalence of vice and in- 
temperance, were among these conditions, no 
one who has taken the trouble to acquaint him- 
self with them will care to deny. 

And, even when these were absent, the situa- 
tion, among the great mass of the working 
classes, has been little better. It was early 
urged that if decenter homes and a cleaner en- 
vironment were given to working men and 
their families, the situation would be greatly 
improved; and much disappointment has been 
expressed when, after, as in some instances has 
been the case, costly and elaborate experi- 
ments have been made in the shape of model 
villages, these experiments have issued in 
meagre and unsatisfactory results. For this, 
however, there is a twofold reason which is, or 
ought to be, altogether intelligible. In the first 
place, character in the highest sense is not 
created by environment. It may be enriched 
and safeguarded by it. But it ought to be ob- 
vious to us that if we could in a moment, 
by the wave of some magic wand, transport 
every working man in the civilized world, with 

146 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

his family but without his poverty-stricken 
belongings, into a palace, we could not by that 
means make of him a good citizen, a faithful 
husband and father, or an upright man. In 
fact, the probabilities are that his new sur- 
roundings would be, to such an one and to 
those who immediately pertained to him, an 
intolerable gene; and that, with his wife and 
children, he would, as indeed has been the case 
in more than one such instance, abandon them 
for surroundings which, however inferior in 
respects which you and I should prize, had to 
him the incomparable attraction of being both 
congenial and familiar. 

^^ Congenial and familiar.'' Do we realize 
what the words stand for? Do we recognize, that 
is to say, the stern fact that, if we are going to 
lift men, we must begin with the man and not 
with his home; that we must awake and edu- 
cate in him a love of decency, of purity, of chas- 
tity—of righteousness, in one word, which will 
make him impatient of an environment that de- 
grades and embrutes him; and that until we 
have somehow done that we may build ten thou- 
sand model villages, and the last will be as 
barren and impotent for any transforming in- 
fluence as the first? 

147 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

And that consideration brings me to that 
other aspect of the whole matter to which I 
have jnst referred. Have yon ever driven 
throngh a New England town ; and did it ever 
occur to you to imagine that the beauty and 
cleanliness, the shaded charm, the scrupulous 
neatness, the note of a true refinement, touch- 
ing alike the cottage and the mansion, were not 
at all the product of the rules and regulations 
of the municipality, but of something infinitely 
more potent than any mere civic machinery,— 
a high ideal in the individual? '^ Those oaks? 
My grandfather planted them. These shrubs? 
My mother watched and pruned them with an 
eye that never overlooked, and a hand that 
never tired. That noble stretch of woodland 
crowning yonder hill? Yes, we are poorer than 
we were in the old days, but tJiose woods are 
not for sale ! ' ' Well might the Vermont stage- 
driver reply to the curious foreigner who, rid- 
ing behind him on the box of a stage-coach, 
asked as lie looked off on a rugged New Eng- 
land landscape, ^^What do you raise here?'^ 
^^Sir, we raise menT^ 

Well, in the final summing up, it all comes 
to that. You may have an industrial system 

148 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

that raises men, or, on the other hand, one that 
ruins them. And if it is not to ruin them, it 
must call to its aid some mightier force than 
money. For that, when we follow most of our 
modern specifics for the moral redemption 
of the working man, is all that has thus far 
been offered him. A friend of clear insight 
and careful observation who went, not a great 
many years ago, in the company of the founder 
and builder of one of those model villages 
to visit it, gave me soon after an account of 
it, the wholly unconscious pathos of which was, 
after all, the note that dominated the whole. 
Here was the pretty and picturesque railway 
station by which you arrived, and yonder were 
the tram-cars, and ranged in fixed and precise 
relation to one another along the broad and 
well-paved avenues were the workmen's cot- 
tages; and this was the ball-ground (on which 
nobody had been seen to play, for it was hedged 
about by many restrictions which discriminated 
sternly against the uncovenanted outsider) ; 
and yonder were the music-hall and the library 
and the reading-rooms, and all the rest of it— 
and oh, how dreary and stiff* and regulated and 
mechanical it all was! ^^Did the people whom 

149 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

you met seem interested in meeting the 
founder?'' I asked. ^^I could not tell," was 
the answer; ^^they all looked away when they 
saw him coming. ' ' What a volume of meaning 
in the words ! This prosperous manufacturer, 
by one or two clever inventions, finds himself, 
after a few years, a man of vast wealth, with 
a great multitude in one way or another de- 
pendent upon him. He feels, dimly, that he 
owes them something more than a mere wage. 
He knows something of the dreary conditions 
under which most of them live in a great and 
overcrowded city, and he sets about remedying 
them, as best he can, by creating his model vil- 
lage. But he brings to it the rule of a master, 
not of a brother. It is his, not theirs, even 
when he has turned it over to them to live in. 
His laws govern it. His tastes dominate it. 
His prejudices, which sometimes he mistakes 
for convictions, obtrude themselves at every 
step. And then, strangely enough, the people 
are not grateful ! They are not even satisfied. 
There are complaints, and dissensions, and re- 
volts against the rules, and by the time these 
have made themselves heard, he is tired and 
disgusted with the whole business, and clear 

150 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

only about one thing, and that is that the work- 
ing man is an ungrateful grumbler. Ah, it 
is not so that you and I can serve him ! First 
of all, we must realize what so few of us have 
even thought far enough to realize, and that 
is, that above all else the working man wants 
fair play; and that, too often, his employer is 
little likely greatly to concern himself about 
this unless the consumer shall compel him. 
And then we who are consumers must concern 
ourselves as to the methods by which that com- 
pulsion shall be brought to bear. 

Legislation is one of these, and it has been 
invoked, sometimes wisely, and sometimes, as 
many people believe, most unwisely. ^^It is 
easy," say such persons, ^^to pass laws which 
shall compel an employer to construct his fac- 
tory, or the homes of his working men, or to 
shorten their hours of work, in accordance with 
provisions which, while they greatly inure to 
the comfort or profit of the wage-earner, will 
ultimately impoverish the employer." It is 
said, and it is said with much truth, that in 
some States the burdens imposed by law upon 
employers are such as practically to crush out 
whole groups of industries. But it ought to be 

151 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

plain that the cause for this, oftener than it has 
been otherwise, has been an indifference on the 
part of the employer which has banded together 
the labor vote in a very frenzy of desperate re- 
sentment that has forced the hand of legisla- 
tures and precipitated the retribution of unrea- 
sonable enactments. Surely, somewhere be- 
tween these two extremes there must be a just 
medium which it is possible for dispassionate 
minds to discover and then firmly to insist 
upon. And therefore, if we can persuade the 
consumer that mere cheapness is not the end of 
life, and that, after all, the well-being of a 
fellow-creature is more precious than a cheap 
^^job-lof upon a bargain counter, we shall 
have begun to enlist the force that, whatever 
may be the power of the lawmaker, is, after 
all, the most powerful of all. 

And that brings me, naturally, to speak of a 
force which already has made itself felt, and 
which is worthy of still wider employment. I 
mean what is known as the Consumers' League. 
There is, I do not forget, a difference of opinion 
as to the value of such leagues, even among 
those who are most seriously and earnestly con- 
cerned for the betterment of our present indus- 

152 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

trial system ; and, that I may not seem to over- 
look such views, I will first quote what is urged 
against them by an authority whom I have al- 
ready invoked, Mr. J. A. Hobson, and whose 
lectures were delivered before the London 
branch of the Christian Social Union: ^^In so 
far, ' ' says Mr. Hobson, ^ ' as the consumers who 
band themselves together to boycott certain 
shops and to give their custom to others are 
actuated by a charitable, self-denying motive, 
they must be regarded as persons who will buy 
in a dearer market when they could buy in a 
cheaper. An attempt is sometimes made to 
shirk this crucial test by suggesting that a Con- 
sumers' League merely induces its members to 
give preference to a good employer over a bad 
employer, both charging the same price for 
similar commodities, but the latter taking an 
illicit and excessive profit. This, however, is 
not a normal result; for where sweating goes 
on in a trade, competing ^sweaters' commonly 
drive down prices to a point at which a fair 
dealer can only with difficulty make a living. 
The normal use of a Consumers' League is to 
induce its members to abstain from buying 
goods at ^sweating' rates, in order to give the 

153 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

trade to a fair lioiise. We must, therefore, 
rightly assume that its members are willing 
to buy dearer goods when they might buy 
cheaper, and that in some cases they will 
actually do so. 

' ' Now I am far from disparaging, ' ' says Mr. 
Hobson, ^^the moral and educational value of 
such a movement. By teaching consumers to 
reflect upon the vital or mortal nature of the 
power they are by expenditure exerting over 
the lives of innumerable hidden workers, and 
by inducing some traders to recognize that the 
industrial functions which they exercise are 
fraught with distinct social and moral signifi- 
cance, they are engaged on an educational cru- 
sade of supreme importance. The organized 
action of a certain number of influential per- 
sons, consumers and producers, in a locality 
can sometimes mould a force of public opinion 
which shall shame the ^sweater' into some 
compliance with decent conditions of employ- 
ment, and may even break down bad 'customs 
of trade. ' But, taking a general survey of the 
field of industry, we find no reason to suppose 
that these moral forces can achieve large re- 
sults in the matter of direct economic reform. 

154 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

So long as the powerful economic forces of 
competition are coercing each manufacturer 
and trader, good- will and moral enlightenment 
among individuals cannot achieve much, nor 
can an amateur society of consumers, however 
skilfully managed, combat successfully the 
pressure of powerful trade interests."^ 

But this, if it is saying anything, is assert- 
ing that powerful trade interests '^are more 
intrinsically or inherently powerful" than 
^^ good-will and moral enlightenment," which, 
in effect, is saying that selfishness is more pow- 
erful than the religion and the principles of 
Jesus Christ, which are the principles of un- 
selfishness. For one, I do not believe it; and 
it is because the ideal of foregoing a present 
gain to one's self for a greater gain to another 
is the Christ-principle which is behind the 
whole idea of the Consumers' League that we 
are bound, as I believe, to regard it as a wise 
and timely instrument for a present industrial 
emergency. 

For, after all, it must be owned, I think, that 
in the hands of the discriminating consumer 
rests finally the settlement of the gravest issues 

1 Hobson, '^ The Social Problem/' p. 139. 
155 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

in the whole industrial problem. Upon the 
narrowest platform and npon the widest, alike, 
the substantial testimony of experience is one. 
The vast and expensive mechanisms which, in 
connection with trade and manufactures for 
the purpose of creating artificial wants, and for 
devising the clever and often apparently suc- 
cessful means for exploiting them, are, in the 
long run, an impressive testimony on this point. 
It is undoubtedly true that, by ingenious and 
more or less sensational advertising, you may 
for a time create a curiosity which shall absorb 
some clever novelty as rapidly as it can be pro- 
duced; but the continued demand for it, any 
intelligent tradesman will tell you, depends 
upon its meeting a want or appealing to a dis- 
tinct need. That need may not be at all a 
higher need; but, on the side of stimulus, rec- 
reation, nutriment, or solace, it must be a dis- 
tinct need, and the thing that meets it must 
have for its purpose a real adaptation. One 
cannot, however, recognize that fact without 
being at once confronted with the question, e.g.y 
what are real needs, and what is a wise or right 
provision for them? It is at once the most un- 
intelligent and inhuman view of them to say 

156 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

that they are, in the case of a working man any 
more than with you or me, only such provision 
as satisfies the craving for food and drink, for 
clothing, warmth, and shelter. These things we 
provide for our beasts of burden, in the interest 
of a wise economy of their physical powers in 
our service; and, if we ascended no higher, we 
are bound to do as much for the working men 
and women. But these are not only beasts of 
burden: they are human beings, with powers, 
however imperfectly unfolded, capable of tak- 
ing hold upon that upper realm in which are 
the joy of learning and the greater joy of 
knowing. 

How, now, does the production of a vast pro- 
portion of what you and I consume, tend either 
directly or indirectly to the betterment of the 
condition of the working man and the enlarge- 
ment of his mental horizon? I have already 
elsewhere given in brief a recent annual drink 
bill of this nation; but has it ever occurred to 
us to ask who are the producers of this ten 
hundred million dollars which is spent every 
year in this country for intoxicating drinks? 
xVlas, it is the working man who produces them, 
and mainly the working man who consumes 

157 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

them; but lie who is enriched by them and who 
therefore comes under the head of the con- 
sumer as we are now considering that term, is 
the stockholder in every brewery, every dis- 
tillery, every saloon in the land who is reaping 
the profits of this trade, consuming the interest 
on moneys invested in such business, and, alas ! 
too often enriching himself at the cost of the 
bodies and souls of his fellow-men. 

There are other instances which will at once 
occur to you which are not so extreme ; but to 
any reflecting mind it ought to be plain that, in 
a very real sense, the question of consumption 
is the bottom question of all. I am constantly 
asked by people who resent the demand for a 
better wage for the working man, ^^What ser- 
vice can you render such an one by an increase 
in his earnings which he is sure to spend in 
luxuries? You have just been talking about 
the drink bill of the nation. Do you know how 
much of it is the drink bill of day-laborers? 
You insist that the working man shall have 
more margin in his system of expenditure than 
the narrow wage which barely gives him food 
and warmth and shelter. When he gets it, have 
you ever taken the trouble to notice the foolish 

158 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

and wanton extravagances in which he expends 
it— the cheap finery, the pinchbeck jewellery, 
the tawdry bedizenment with which his home 
and his wife and his children are disfigured? 
You would have him spend it in that which will 
improve his mind, safeguard his health, pro- 
vide for his future. Well, he won't!" 

Well, do you? Look at the modern Ameri- 
can home in what we are wont to call its best 
estate. How overcrowded with the exhibitions of 
a hybrid taste, half imitation and half barbaric 
sensuousness, it is; how lacking in a fine and 
high-bred simplicity ; how reeking with the lust 
of mere display; how hot and rancid, often, 
with the stench of mere cost, cost^ cost, from 
end to end! And as of houses, so of persons. 
Said one friend to another enquiring after 
a third who had created a marked sensa- 
tion at a great social function : ^^How did Mrs. 
So-and-so appear?" Said the person whom 
she addressed, ^^She appeared to be smeared 
with diamonds." ^^Oh," exclaimed the inter- 
rogator, referring to the rather strong term 
applied to her friend, ^^how very coarse T^ 
^^Yes," answered the first. ^^But I should 
rather describe such vulgar and prodigal dis- 

159 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

play as not so much coarse as wanton/' And 
she was right. For no one of us can indulge 
his own lust of ostentation or extravagance, 
whether it touches his person, his home, or his 
equipage, or any other form of expenditure, 
without setting in motion a whole series of in- 
fluences which reach down, and down, and down, 
until it fires the fierce covetousness and inflames 
the undisciplined passions of that vast substra- 
tum upon which, after all, the peace and pros- 
perity of the republic must forever rest. How- 
ever much we may hate the fact, or hate to have 
any one remind us of the fact, the fact remains : 
^^No man liveth to himself and no man dieth 
to himself.'' As consumers of all or anything 
that enters into the usage and habit of a mod- 
ern life, great or small, costly or cheap, neces- 
sary or ornamental, you and I are bound up 
with that vast network of producers which to- 
day spreads all round the world, from the tea- 
planters and silk-weavers and cotton-spinners 
of India or China or Japan to our own, and 
on whom, directly or indirectly, our expendi- 
tures, indulgences, luxuries, or comforts, and 
the demand for them, act and react to the 
last and remotest extremities. 

160 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

And so we see our common calling. It is, 
if I have read it aright, a threefold relation of 
intelligence, of responsibility, and of sacrifice. 
The science which is known as political econ- 
omy has been called the dismal science; and 
that branch of it which has undertaken to 
concern itself with the problems which in these 
lectures we have attempted to discuss has been 
called, by some in derision and by some in 
despair, the ' ' occult science. ' ^ It is neither. It 
has its inevitable obscurities,— most of all, I 
think, because some of the more difficult ques- 
tions with which it is concerned, such as those 
of wages, hours of labor, the unearned incre- 
ment, and the like, are, so to speak, questions 
which are yet in transitu. But on the whole, 
there are, certainly there are for you and me, 
broad principles of primal rights, of associated 
duty, of the obligations of trusteeship, whether 
of capital or brains, or of any other personal 
power, which Jesus Christ has not left in 
doubt. Their application to sociological ques- 
tions has been challenged, I have no doubt 
honestly, by men by whom, whatever their per- 
sonal attitude to Christ, his teachings are re- 
garded, with reference to this whole sub- 

161 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ject, as visionary or irrelevant. But, since 
you and I know better than that, we must con- 
cern ourselves to make our practice square 
with our knowledge. It is the life and the 
teaching of this Elder Brother of the race that 
we must bring to bear, not only upon the rela- 
tionships which I have here discussed, but upon 
all those others in which human society is 
bound together. It is the divorce of that life 
and teaching from the life of to-day, the social 
problems of to-day, the capitalist and working 
man of to-day, of which we are most of all in 
danger. The supreme vice of what is called 
commercialism— by which I suppose we may 
understand, in this connection at any rate, the 
hard dominance of certain laws of supply and 
demand, of production and profit, of the exten- 
sion of markets rather than the extension of 
morals— is that it is without an ideal. ^^ Busi- 
ness should concern itself, ' ' we are told, ' ' with 
the real. ' ' Precisely ; but what is the real ? In 
what scales will you weigh it, with what 
yard-stick will you measure it, in what pack- 
ages will you export it? One sees the world's 
merchandise ranged along the wharves of our 
modem civilization, and stacked up in huge 
piles for transportation to foreign consumers, 

162 



THE CITIZEN AND THE CONSUMER 

and sometimes, as one passes along, he notes 
such costly packages as marked with the word 
^ ^ perishable. " Tragic and prophetic inscrip- 
tion, both in one; for the question which the 
student of the future will have to answer will 
be the question how far a civilization built 
upon such foundations is, not some of it per- 
ishable, but all of it frail, foolish, and swiftly 
perished. And so I bid you to strive to hold 
up before the eyes of men the ideal of a life, 
not of great material gains but of high, exalted 
aims: the aim of a fearless love of truth and 
then the fearless search for it ; the aim of ser- 
vice and the aim of sacrifice. That great teacher 
and true prophet,— for us all too soon called up 
higher,— I mean the late Bishop of Durham, 
Brooke Foss Westcott, who passed on a little 
while ago to his reward, proposed to an assem- 
blage to which he spoke one night in West- 
minster Abbey, the creation, in the interests 
of the practical solution of the problems which 
we have been now here discussing, of a fel- 
lowship of Brethren and Sisters of the Com- 
mon Hope.^ ^^That fellowship,'' he said, 
^^must be social. Every member of it must 
hold himself pledged to regard his endow- 

1 See ^' Social Aspects of Christianity/' Lecture IV. 
163 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ments of character, of power, of place, of 
wealth, as a trust to be administered with 
resolute and conscious purpose for the good of 
men: pledged to spread and deepen the sense 
of one life, one interest, one hope, one end, for 
all, in the household, in the factory, in the ware- 
house, in the council-room: pledged to strive, 
as he has the opportunity, to bring all things 
that are great and pure and beautiful within 
the reach of every fellow-worker: pledged to 
labor so that, to the full extent of his example 
and his influence, toil may be universally hon- 
ored as service to the state, literature may be 
ennobled as the spring and not the substitute 
of thought, art (too often the minister of lux- 
ury) may be hallowed as the interpreter of the 
outward signs of God's working. 

^^All things are ready. . . . Look back- 
ward for the inspiring encouragement of ex- 
perience. Look forward for the glorious assur- 
ance of hope. But look around you, without 
closing your ears to one bitter cry, or closing 
your eyes against one piteous sight, or refusing 
thought to one stern problem, for your proper 
work, and then thankfully accept it in the 
name of God!'' 

164 



V 

THE CITIZEN AND THE CORPORATION 

THE law of association is as old as human 
society ; indeed, in its higher forms, it may- 
be said to mark the ascent of that society from 
its more primitive and barbaric forms. First of 
all, as I have already pointed out, we have the 
ascent from the patriarchal to the tribal organi- 
zation of society, and then, in turn, from the 
latter to the dynastic and imperial forms. 
And out of these, in time, there come, by an 
inevitable law of evolution, those minor forms 
of organization, military, social, ecclesiastical, 
commercial, through which we ascend step by 
step to those extremely complex and all but 
all-encompassing mechanisms of corporate ac- 
tivity which we know to-day as industrial. 

It is, in my judgment, impossible for the citi- 
zen who is a student to ignore these, even if he 
should desire to do so. A corporation has been 

165 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

defined by some one as a ^ Apiece of machin- 
ery''; and the maxim of Sir Edward Coke, 
^^Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be 
outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no 
souls," is one which, detached from its imme- 
diate connection, is widely employed to remind 
us that the acts of corporations are to be ac- 
cepted as, in a sense, outside the area, as of 
human sentiments, so of human responsibilities. 
Indeed, in this connection it is one of the hu- 
miliating notes of modem history that, while 
the law by no means excepts a corporation from 
a corporate responsibility, the history of cor- 
porations has not, ordinarily, revealed them as 
recognizing such responsibility until the pen- 
alties of the law have been rigorously invoked 
to compel such recognition. 

It would be interesting, if in this connection 
there were space for it, to enquire how far this 
characteristic of corporations, which is observa- 
ble even in their earliest history, arose from the 
circumstances of their origin. The organized 
life of earlier peoples— Egypt, Persia, and the 
rest— can hardly be said to have anything an- 
swering to our modern corporations. They 
were, as a rule, imperial despotisms, in which 

166 



THE CORPORATION 

corporate activities were represented only or 
mainly by the army. But with the progress of 
Eoman arts, arms, and letters toward a world- 
wide ascendency, there came into being, nnder 
an increasing necessity, those associations of 
individuals known as collegia, which origi- 
nally consisted of at least three persons who 
were said to be cor porati;— habere corpus. 
' ' They could hold property in common, and had 
a common chest. They might sue and be sued 
by (or through) their agent {syndicus or 
actor). There was a complete separation in 
law between the rights of a collegium as 
a body and those of its individual mem- 
bers. The collegium remained in existence, 
although all its original members were 
changed; and it was governed by its own by- 
laws, provided those were not contrary to the 
common law.''^ Naturally enough, the ear- 
liest of these Eoman corporations were civi- 
tates or municipalities; and after them came 
collegia of priests or vestal virgins, and the 
various trade associations, fahri, navicularii, 
etc., which represented interests such as those 
which are most conspicuous in the corporate 

1 Robertson, Professor of Roman Law, University of London. 

167 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

life of onr own day. With the dawn of the 
Christian era these corporations underwent 
the transformations in aim and purpose which 
were inevitable from those changes which fol- 
lowed in its train; but a fact of principal sig- 
nificance is that, instead of disappearing with 
other mechanisms which were distinctive of a 
pagan society, they seem, on the contrary, to 
have attracted the attention and secured the 
approval of the church. For when one comes 
to study the history of the religious orders, he 
soon discovers, if not at first then ultimately, 
that their monastic features, in the strict con- 
struction of that term, were by no means their 
most conspicuous feature. The theory upon 
which they came into being— viz., that they 
were to be a refuge from worldly cares and 
business— vanished before a great while, as, 
step by step, they grew in numbers and powers ; 
and those of us who are under the impression— 
which some churchmen in our mother-country 
have striven with great earnestness to pro- 
duce—that the suppression of monasteries by 
Henry VIII, and the confiscation of the prop- 
erty of religious orders, were instances of a 
wanton and arbitrary abuse of kingly power 

168 



THE CORPORATION 

which grossly wronged bodies of devout and 
godly men, have only to push their studies 
of the history of monasticism a little far- 
ther back in order to learn that the secu- 
larization of these religious corporations, and 
their large devotion to worldly ends by not 
very scrupulous means, were notes of their 
history at least five hundred years earlier, 
as the testimony of their own highest authori- 
ties and the bulls of popes and decrees of 
councils abundantly testify. The matter is 
of interest here, and pertinent to this discus- 
sion, because it discovers for our admonition 
an inevitable tendency in the principle of the 
corporation with which those who are, or are 
to be, teachers are directly and gravely con- 
cerned. There can be no question that the evil 
in religious corporations arose, as the evils in 
all other corporations have arisen, from the 
existence of occult and irresponsible powers. 
The monastic life involved seclusion. Its domi- 
nant note was not merely, as is commonly un- 
derstood, that its members could not come out 
into the world, but even more that the world 
could not come into, nor see into, its precincts, 
its rules, its occupations, its life. It drew to- 

1G9 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

gether and bound together, in a common in- 
terest and purpose, a body of men or women, 
all of whom were not clever or acute or aggres- 
sive,— most of whom, indeed, were none of 
these things,— and who, therefore, furnished or- 
dinarily the most efficient tools for those who 
were. And then there followed what is always 
apt to follow where there is a situation which 
has in it the elements of secrecy, opportunity, 
and a cooperating constituency. In a religious 
order obviously sordid or dubious methods or 
aims were skilfully draped as means to a glori- 
ous end; even as in a modern corporation 
doubtful or equivocal features are excused for 
the sake of splendid successes. And so these 
ancient or mediaeval corporations grew and 
spread until their very existence became a men- 
ace to the communities that tolerated them, 
and a stain upon the church that fostered them. 
The historian of the future may wisely disinter 
their story for the side-lights that it will 
cast upon the powers and perils of the modern 
corporation. 

That story would not be complete, however, 
if it ignored those other corporations, not eccle- 
siastical but secular, of which the middle ages 

170 



THE CORPORATION 

were also the parents ; and which were, in their 
turn, the forerunners of another form of cor- 
poration even more precisely industrial in its 
character than any other,— I mean the guilds. 
In one sense it would be inaccurate to describe 
these as the children of the middle ages ; for, in 
fact, there are traces of them in Greece two or 
three centuries before Christ, designated some- 
times as eranoi (clubs), or, again, as thiasoi 
(companies), and to be found at Rhodes, in the 
islands of the Archipelago, at the Piraeus, and 
elsewhere. These guilds or associations seem, 
in many of their characteristics, to have antici- 
pated the trade or artisan societies of the tenth 
and following centuries of the Christian era, 
and to have found their origin in much the 
same aims. In a word, the position of the work- 
man, two thousand years ago and more, was not 
in most respects greatly different from what 
it is to-day. Single-handed, he was no match 
for his employer. The latter could dismiss 
him at his will, and hire another in his place. 
He could engage him at one wage, and next 
week reduce him to another. He could hire 
him to work twelve hours a day, and constrain 
him, when once his task was begun, to continue 

171 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

it for fifteen or twenty. "Why? Because, if the 
workman was dissatisfied, his employer could 
not only discharge him on the instant and hire 
some one else, but could do so indefinitely; and 
so long as this situation continued, labor was 
virtually under the employers' heel. I state 
the case in these bald terms because I want, if 
I may, to get you to realize that situation to 
which the modern trades-union was the alterna- 
tive. The ancient society of this class had this 
one great advantage over the modern trades- 
union: that the master workman or mechanic, 
who was often the employer of apprentices 
and inferior craftsmen, was himself a member 
of the guild. The social divisions which then 
separated classes were largely different from 
our own; and that system which arrayed 
them as nobles, gentry, and commoners grouped 
all handicraftsmen, whether of high or low 
degree, together. We think that we have 
gained a great deal in abolishing all these dis- 
tinctions in our own day, but the question as 
to what we have lost in doing so never 
seems to have occurred to us. One thing, at 
any rate, we have lost, which in some aspects 
of it was more precious than all the rest, and 

172 



THE CORPORATION 

that is contacts. If anybody to-day cares to 
tell the truth about the matter of social distinc- 
tions in the United States of America,— which 
most of us, unfortunately, don't,— he will be 
compelled to own that, from top to bottom, all 
over the land, amid whatever community or 
neighborhood or village, the effort that is most 
strenuous and most persistent is, not to draw 
near to our fellow-men, but to draw away from 
them; to remind other people, by our preten- 
sions, our reserves, our condescensions mixed 
with contempt, that we are not as other men 
are, and least of all as they. Now, the enor- 
mous advantage of the trade and artisan guilds 
of mediaeval times was that they antagonized 
this tendency, and drew men together: the 
master and the craftsman ; the artisan and the 
laborer; the artist and the drudge. It is im- 
possible to read the history of the greater 
guilds, whether in Germany, France, Holland, 
or England, without discovering how fine a 
spirit of esprit de corps they kindled, and how 
great a stimulus they gave both to fine work- 
manship and to brotherly fidelity in the doing 
of it. 

In the two aims or motives which I have 
173 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

thus indicated, we have, it wonld appear, an 
unanswerable argument for the existence of the 
trade-guilds, and, if so, for the trades-unions. . 
They were the defence of the weak workman, 
and the inspiration of the less capable one. He 
had, if he were weak, his order behind him ; he 
had, if he were but poorly competent, the enno- 
bling example of his order before him. There 
can be no question, I think, that the guild 
of other ages gave the world better work 
and better men to do it, and the men them- 
selves a better wage and a juster master. 
There can be as little question, I am per- 
suaded, that the guild of to-day, which is 
the trades-union, can be made a no less effi- 
cient agency, not for the good of a class only, 
but for the good of the whole. 

That, as yet, it has so often and so largely 
failed of any such results is owing to considera- 
tions which, as yet imperfectly recognized, will, 
when they are perceived and accepted, vastly 
improve, if they do not wholly transform, the 
whole situation. The trades-unions, e.g.j have, 
as a rule, maintained toward employers an at- 
titude of armed neutrality. The most generous 
.efforts on the part of manufacturers and others 

174 



THE CORPORATION 

to manifest, in their dealings with their "work- 
men, a considerate and liberal spirit have often 
been met with a temper of suspicion and dis- 
trust which would be grotesque if it were not 
so pathetic. An illustration of what I mean has 
recently been afforded in connection with an 
enquiry conducted by the Board of Trade in 
England as to the matter of profit-sharing by 
workmen. As students of economics will re- 
member, experiments more or less successful 
in this direction have been made in France,— 
of which that by M. Leclaire, the house-painter 
of Paris, is much the most noteworthy,— in Bel- 
gium, in England, and by Mr. Nelson in this 
country, near St. Louis. I shall not attempt to 
discuss the value of these experiments in this 
connection, to which they are only remotely 
germane ; but I would ask your attention to the 
answers of several trades-unions to questions 
as to the value of profit-sharing as a feature of 
the relations of employers and workpeople; 
the principle of profit-sharing being simply 
that every working man should have, in addi- 
tion to his covenanted wage, a certain share of, 
or percentage upon, the profits of the busi- 
ness; the idea being, of course, to give the 

175 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

workman a more direct interest in his employ- 
er 's particular enterprise, and a stimulus to 
diligence and fidelity in his own part of it. 
Now it would not seem that in such a proposi- 
tion there was anything hostile or derogatory 
to the working man, but only something which 
would appeal to his sympathy and apprecia- 
tion, if not to his ambition. Listen now to the 
reception which from certain trades-unions 
the proposition received: 

One trades-union replied: ^^ Conditions of 
scheme antagonistic to freedom of men, con- 
trary to custom of trade, and opposed to trades- 
union principle. ' ' 

Again : ' ' The union has never made any for- 
mal objection, but has always regarded the 
scheme as an excuse for getting the men to 
work at high pressure and turn out more work 
than under ordinary circumstances. ' ' 

Again : ' ' Has a tendency to rob a man of his 
manly independence, and to remove the scope 
and field of trades-unions.'^ 

Again: '^Because all do not share, and the 
employees know not what the profits are for 
the year. The employer, the men said, had 
speculated and made heavy losses. ' ' 

176 



THE CORPORATION 

Again fresh grounds for objection are sug- 
gested: ^^ Because a different system of work- 
ing has been introduced whereby two men have 
to turn out an amount of work equal to that 
which took three men to do.'' ^^ Because of a 
certain amount of suspicion that the employers 
who introduce the system (of profit-sharing) 
wish to weaken the influence of trade organiza- 
tions upon the men ; and because it is believed 
that the fact of a bonus being given induces the 
men to hide, or fail to take action against, 
breaches of trades-union regulations.''^ 

Now I have no slightest intention of discuss- 
ing the force or value of these objections on the 
part of working men to a system of profit-shar- 
ing; but simply to call your attention to the 
animus which inspires them, of which, unless 
I have been misinformed, we have had illus- 
trations nearer home. At the first view it is 
profoundly discouraging and no less pro- 
foundly mysterious that a proposition on the 
whole so manly and generous as that of profit- 
sharing by the employer with his workmen 
should be met with such pronounced distrust 
and suspicion. Of course, it is to be taken for 

1 See Board of Trade Report, 1894, pp. 182-187. 
177 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

granted that the master sees beforehand the 
probabilities, in the stimulus thus offered them, 
of increased advantage to himself as well as to 
his workmen ; but equally of course it ought to 
be recognized that, as to this, there is no cer- 
tainty, while as to the essential principle there 
is an element of absolute equity which deserves 
to be both recognized and honored. And yet, 
in spite of these considerations, a proposition 
to certain trades-unions in the direction of 
profit-sharing is met by criticisms which just 
stop short of calling it a trick, and the purpose 
behind it a carefully devised scheme for in- 
veigling more work out of the already over- 
tasked laborer. 

Now, as I have said, the particular facts here, 
in any particular case, are of very secondary 
consequence. But what is of consequence in a 
world in which, to-day, the industrial classes 
include a vast multitude, if not, in Christian 
lands, a vast majority, of our fellow-men, is 
the answer to the question, ^^What has pro- 
duced such an attitude of mind, and what has 
made it so widely chronic ? ' ' For, to carry the 
whole matter to its foundation facts, the dis- 
closure of such a temper reveals the animus 

178 



THE CORPORATION 

not of a comnmnity of civilized men bound to- 
gether by a common impulse in the peaceful 
avocations of a well-ordered and law-abiding 
land: it means war. Timeo Danaos et dona 
f event es describes precisely that attitude of 
the modern working man to the majority, thus 
far, of the amicable propositions which have 
been made to him by incorporated capital and 
its management. 

And there are for this, I believe, two reasons. 
One of these, on behalf of the working man, I 
desire unreservedly to recognize. He has been 
poorly advised, and, ordinarily, worse led. The 
labor agitator is too often a flamboyant ora- 
tor of loud voice, reckless invective, largely in- 
accurate speech, inconsequent and tremendous 
gift of denunciation. When hearing him shout 
and stamp and anathematize on platforms, 
calling for the power to crush the tyrant cor- 
poration or capitalist, I have been reminded of 
a colored preacher of whom my right rever- 
end brother of Tennessee relates this incident: 
On one occasion he was leading the meeting in 
prayer, which consisted mainly in his shouting 
over and over again, ^^O Lord, give us mo' 
powah— mo' powah, Lord!'' until a colored 

179 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

brother beside bim, exasperated beyond endu- 
rance, at length interjected, ^'Oh, g'long, brud- 
der ! Yonse got powah enough. Better ask de 
Lawd to give yo some mo' idees!" Yes, mod- 
erately instructed brains, the capacity in men 
who seek to lead others to recognize facts and 
their relations,— these are what labor, or any 
other cause like it, needs, and needs in this con- 
nection most of all. 

But when I have said this, and I have tried 
to say it with absolute candor, it is not the 
whole case; and, so far as the distrust on the 
part of working men and of trades-unions 
toward corporations is concerned, it is a very 
inferior element in the jBnal fact. Labor, 
whether individual or organized, is often un- 
reasonable, often misinformed, often wayward ; 
but human nature is substantially the same, 
pagan or Christian, in Patagonia or in Con- 
necticut; and this concerning it is a bald and 
naked fact which if any mill manager or any 
other representative of a corporation under- 
takes to contradict, there is only one answer to 
make to him, and that is, that he is an ignoramus 
or a falsifier,— that fair dealing provokes fair 
dealing, and sharp practice equally invites 

180 



THE CORPORATION 

sharp practice. Read the travellers' tales about 
the African negro from Zanzibar to the great 
Nyanza, and a greater scoundrel, thief, liar, 
traitor, brute-beast, does not walk the earth; 
and then read the life of David Livingstone, 
and follow the dusky band who, with a tender- 
ness and reverence that no funeral procession 
that ever trod the earth excelled, carried his 
dead body all the way from that spot in the 
heart of the dark continent where he breathed 
out his life to the ship that bore those sacred 
ashes to their final resting-place in Westminster 
Abbey ; and then take care how you generalize 
about men, or races, or classes on the basis of 
insufficient facts! For with men, whether in 
a wilderness or in a mill, it is, after all, as it 
is with women in a kitchen. There are heads 
of households whom we all know, who never 
keep a servant a week, whose every domestic 
is ^ ^ a thief, " ^ ^ an idler, ' ' or ^ ^ an incompetent ' ' ; 
people whose homes are the perpetual scenes 
of discussions and dismissals, and whose testi- 
mony, if it were given in a court of justice, 
under oath, would be that there had never been 
an honest or faithful domestic in their houses ; 
and yet, next door to just such people, there are 

181 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

households wherein reign peace and order and 
mntnal consideration, and where the service 
that is rendered earns not only its wages, but 
respect and gratitude,— and deserves them 
both. 

The subject brings us to one consideration in 
the relation of corporations to their workmen 
which is practically wholly unrecognized. The 
ordinary discussion as to the relatioais of the 
laborer and the corporation which employs 
him concerns itself wholly with these two par- 
ties. But a recent writer in the ^^ Economic 
Eeview," Mr. W. H. Lever, ^ has brought out 
with singular acumen the intermediate term in 
the whole problem, without which the others are 
all but meaningless. ' ' In order, ' ' he says, ' ' to 
study fairly and accurately this question" (he 
is speaking at the nioment of profit-sharing), 
^^we will commence with a consideration of that 
hackneyed expression ^Capital and Labor.' 
Never have two words been less understood. 
To make them understood, and connect them 
together, you must add the word ' management, ' 
and make the phrase read, ^Capital, manage- 
ment, labor.' What are the facts? We have 

1 *^ Economic Eeview," January 15, 1901 ; Vol. XI, No. 1. 

182 



THE CORPORATION 

all known many instances where labor starting 
without capital has prospered, and where capi- 
tal without labor has prospered. But in all 
such cases there has been good management. 
We know of instances, innumerable as the sands 
on the sea-shore, where capital and labor have 
joined together without good management, but 
the result has always been failure. Capital 
and labor both are dependent on manage- 
ment. • . . The expression, therefore, ' Capital 
and Labor' standing alone is misleading, and 
creates an entirely false impression. ' ' " Those 
of us who have, ' ' adds this writer, ' ' socialistic 
tendencies, and desire that the conditions of 
labor should be improved, believing that the 
improvement of the condition of labor is the 
only safe and certain means for the improve- 
ment of the whole human race, reject this con- 
fusion of ideas. Labor has looked upon capital 
as its sworn enemy. Capital at the same time 
rails against labor and labor leaders as the foes 
of civilization, security, and prosperity, and 
prophesies coming disasters. We regret this the 
more because it is clear that capital is the friend 
of labor, and labor is the friend of capital, and 
both are, in a greater or lesser degree, dependent 

183 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

on each other. It is bad management which is 
the sworn foe to both. Adam Smith is largely 
responsible for the antagonism of labor towards 
capital, through his statement that labor is the 
source of all wealth. During a century that say- 
ing has been accepted as the final word on that 
subject, and as an axiom in political economy. 
A greater mistake was never made, nor one that 
has had more prejudicial effects on the minds 
of trades-unionists and working men generally. 
Labor of itself can never produce wealth; in 
fact, it will barely produce sufficient to feed, 
clothe, and house the laborer. But if labor is 
well directed, if the fairy of good management 
appears on the scene, all is changed, and labor 
can produce, does produce— wealth beyond the 
dreams of avarice.'' 

Unfortunately, the writer of this acute criti- 
cism does not define for us what he understands 
by ' ' good management, ' ' but I apprehend that 
most men could define it for him. ' ' Good man- 
agement, ' ' it would be said, ' ' is energetic man- 
agement, aggressive management,— the man- 
agement that achieves results." Yes, but what 
results? We all know what is meant by that 
phrase in the mouth of the clever and driving 

184 



THE CORPORATION 

manager, such as the ordinary corporation puts 
in charge of its industrial activities. Eesults 
with him are measured by the amount of work 
turned out, and the low figure down to which 
expenses are crowded. The man who can pro- 
duce a favorable report along these lines is 
a good manager, and would be largely sought 
after by any corporation in the land. And yet, 
such a man, with all these aptitudes, may be a 
brute, a tyrant, or a slave-driver. For, al- 
though we have abolished the institution which 
stood for these things, we have not abolished 
the things themselves. The hard pressure of 
the inexorable superintendent, the boorish 
rudeness of an unmannerly manager, the not 
very scrupulous adroitness of some such official 
when contracting with a working man for his 
labor,— these, whether we care to recognize it or 
not, are more than any other the causes of the 
unrest, the unreasonableness, the organized re- 
sistance, the muttered discontent, the secret plot- 
tings with which so many of the pages of our 
industrial history are filled. And yet, if, in the 
selection of a manager by a corporation which 
employs large bodies of working men, the ques- 
tion were raised whether he were a man of 

185 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

equable temper, of self-restraint, of courtesy, 
of kindly sympathies and civil speech, it would 
ordinarily be received by any such corporation 
with shouts of laughter. 

Now the point which I wish to urge just here 
is this, which I presume will surprise the aver- 
age business man or member of a corporation, 
who is wont to regard the lucubrations of the 
clergy about matters of business with a good- 
humored condescension or contempt, as the talk 
of a well-intentioned but rather feeble-minded 
person who does n't know what he is talking 
about,— and that is, that this boisterous laugh- 
ter is simply not ' ' good business. " It is a part 
of a larger whole,— of that disease, in other 
words, which in our modern business life is 
tending more and more to dismiss the moral 
element, the element of character, and with it, 
almost altogether, the personal element. It is 
one of the vices of our modern system of manu- 
factures that the proportions of it have all but 
inevitably dismissed in the work or its charac- 
ter the quality of individual touch. A thou- 
sand Waltham watches, we are told, will run 
more nearly together than a thousand Jurgen- 
sen watches, if Jules Jurgensen ever made 

186 



THE CORPORATION 

a thousand, which I doubt ; but when done they 
are, after all, nothing but machines, while his 
is a work of art. Now, the task of the modern 
manager should be to resist this modern ten- 
dency, and most of all to resist it in connection 
with its tendency to mechanicalize men; and 
I venture to say that, in the mill or the fac- 
tory where that consideration has been re- 
spected, where men have been regarded and 
treated as men and not as machinery, where 
the daily contacts have been tempered by 
courtesy, kindliness, and consideration, the 
effect upon the men and their work has been 
direct, appreciable, and marketable, in the 
improved and bettered character of their prod- 
uct. And, to go a step further, when some- 
body writes an inside history of strikes it will 
be discovered how largely labor dissensions 
have been born, if not of bad faith, then of bad 
manners. A curious want of vision in our cap- 
tains of industry fails to recognize the signifi- 
cance to their own undertakings, just here, of 
two classes of leaders— great generals and 
great schoolmasters. With neither of these, 
from Napoleon to Dr. Arnold, has success been 
won by relaxation of discipline, which with the 

187 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

latter was as stern and inexorable as with the 
former. But with both of them, and with all 
their like, the secret of mastery has been the 
secret of personal recognition, discrimination, 
what some one has called ' ' the minor equities, ' ' 
and a respect for them. If a mill manager or a 
corporation should care to learn what a master 
can, by such handling, get out of a man, let him 
read the ^^Life of Stonewall Jackson." 

It is but just, however, to bear in mind that 
the powers of the most capable manager are 
necessarily limited; and that, after all, the re- 
sponsibility for the acts of a corporation rests 
with that body itself. And this leads inevitably 
to another aspect of the whole subject concern- 
ing which just now the Christian teacher must 
not dare to be silent. It would be an interesting 
exercise, if it were practicable, to convene in 
some great hall the representatives of a dozen 
great leading corporations in this land, and call 
upon them, each in turn, to rise in his place and 
give a perfectly candid and explicit history of 
the successive processes by which the huge 
company or trust which he represents attained 
to its present proportions; to tell what 
weaker rivals were remorselessly and often un- 

188 



THE CORPORATION 

scrupulously crushed in its progress ; what mis- 
leading representations were given out to de- 
ceive its competitors; what indirect processes 
were employed conveniently to ^^bulP' or 
^^bear'' the stock-markets in its behalf; what 
doctored statements were furnished to the pub- 
lic or to the government in lieu of accurate and 
truthful information; and how far the present 
property of this or that corporation is due to 
such processes. '^Yes/' I hear some one say, 
^4t might be interesting and to some people 
mighty entertaining. But what are you going 
to do about it? Suppose, after such an expose 
of the methods of some such corporation, you 
published the names of the corporators and 
stockholders who are drawing, annually, their 
huge percentages from these huge trusts and 
companies, do you suppose that you could per- 
suade them to throw up their stock and dis- 
gorge their gains? Human nature being what 
it is, what can you do about it?'' 

It is because human nature is what it is that 
I think that something can be done about it. A 
people's moral standards are the product of 
three things: their inheritance of tradition, 
their atmosphere, and their ideals. Now, in 

189 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

the case of modem America, the inheritance of 
tradition has been, on the whole, very good. 
We have behind ns, largely though not, alas! 
invariably, as witness the Mississippi and Vir- 
ginia and other repudiations which here I will 
not particularize— but, on the whole, a high tra- 
dition for commercial honor. An American 
gold coin has come to be almost— not quite- 
like an English gold coin or bank note, which 
I have never found anywhere— think of it!— all 
round the world to be received for other than 
its full face value, than which I think there 
can be no prouder fact, insignificant as it may 
seem, in the history of that great Empire; 
for it means that it is an empire that always 
keeps its promises. But an American gold coin 
also, I say, has come to be everywhere that 
travel and traffic have gone an equally accepted 
standard of enduring value, and so a witness 
for honest dealing between nation and nation 
and man and man. That may fairly be claimed, 
I think, to be our national tradition. But it can- 
not be said to be our commercial atmosphere. 
That may be tested, I think, by the ordinary 
converse of commercial people; and if, in de- 
scribing a transaction in trade or manufactures 

190 



THE CORPORATION 

in which one trader had overreached and out- 
witted another, and in which a course of action 
had been resorted to which, if arraigned in a 
court of justice, would undoubtedly be desig- 
nated as chicanery, such a course of action were 
received when described as anything else than 
a piece of pretty shrewd business cleverness; 
if, still more, it were openly reprobated and 
denounced as the unscrupulous and essentially 
dishonest thing that it was,— that, I apprehend, 
would be ordinarily as unexpected as it would 
be apt to be described as an utterly unwarranted 
thing. Is it not likely, in other words, that if, 
under such circumstances as I have described, 
A. B. indulged in any disparaging comment of 
an equivocal transaction, C. D. or some other 
would promptly respond, ^^ Really, my friend, 
you are a little too good for human nature's 
daily use. If you don 't approve of our methods 
you can get out"? 

And— for, after all, that is the crux in the 
whole business— does A. B. get out? Does he 
utter any protest? Does he seek to induce 
others to unite with him in such a protest ? And 
if he does none of these things, does he recog- 
nize the immediate tendency and the ultimate 

191 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

issue of such a policy of silence and of acqui- 
escence as lie feels himself authorized to pur- 
sue? We are impatient, many of us, in these 
days, at the persistent attacks which are being 
made by a certain class of agitators upon cor- 
porations and corporate wealth. We are satis- 
fied that much of it is inspired by envy, or cov- 
etousness, or even worse motives. We are fond 
of saying, some of us, that modern socialism, 
with its confiscation of all private wealth, is 
only another form of piracy or highway rob- 
bery, and that the men who lend themselves to 
such methods and policies of social revolution 
are criminals in posse, if not in esse. Well, 
sometimes we may be right, but quite as often 
we are wrong. The policy that, in regard to 
property, and especially corporate property, 
would expropriate it for the common benefit, is 
born sometimes of a profound conviction that 
no other policy can arrest the often fraudulent 
processes by which it has been acquired. The 
history of the disposal of valuable franchises 
by the city or the state, under circumstances 
that leave no honest margin for doubt as to the 
corrupt influences by which they have been 
achieved; the frequent coincidence of the ex- 

192 



THE CORPORATION 

penditure of large sums of money by corpora- 
tions with certain votes by a legislature secur- 
ing for a song certain privileges to certain other 
corporations: these are things concerning 
which no one who is adequately informed in 
regard to them has any smallest doubt; nor 
that they have been, and are, acquiesced in 
by those who have profited and are profiting 
by them. And do such persons, or the corpora- 
tions that act for them, suppose that knowledge 
of this sort is wholly in their own keeping, and 
that it never leaks out or filters down? And 
if it does, can there be any doubt about the fes- 
tering and exasperating irritation that it is 
destined inevitably to produce in the minds of 
those who, if not directly wronged them- 
selves by such transactions, know that others 
have been wronged, and that some vast 
aggregation of corporate capital, with its 
fabulous annual, semi-annual, or quarterly 
dividends, represents property which has 
not honestly been acquired? These are facts, 
believe me, which no one in all the world is so 
much concerned in recognizing as the people 
who, ordinarily, are most indifferent to them. 
Such persons turn away with an impatient 

193 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

or resentful exclamation against mutterings 
which, if only they could heed them, might 
sooner or later create a public sentiment that, 
in time, would make corporate wealth as secure 
and corporate management as respected as are 
to-day the wealth and the business methods of 
the most honored and trusted private citizen 
in any community in the land. 

And in this, most of all, is our hope, and inci- 
dentally, let me add, the pertinency of what I 
have said in this connection to the whole sub- 
ject. There is no smallest doubt that, by a 
steadily and of late rapidly increasing number 
of people, the growth of corporate wealth and 
its aggregation in huge trusts have been re- 
garded with increasing apprehension. With- 
out impugning in the smallest degree the honor 
or integrity of those by whom, in many in- 
stances, these results have been brought about, 
it is widely felt that the mere existence of vast 
consolidations, whether of men, money, or 
power in other forms, has in it the possibility 
of mischievous if not malign results; and the 
impulse to limit or to restrain such combina- 
tions by law is undoubtedly growing, and may 
easily, ere long, bear fruit. I will not under- 

194 



THE CORPORATION 

take to say that it will be wholly in vain. It 
may easily be that legislation in some form 
may restrict, and perhaps altogether defeat, 
aggressive movements of this sort. But, unfor- 
tunately, corporations have, in this connection, 
a weapon at their command which has more 
than once befogged the brain of the lawmaker, 
and sometimes, it is to be feared, corrupted the 
interpreter or executive of the law, and so made 
the statute as impotent as though it had never 
been drawn. 

And therefore we must go behind the statute 
to the men that make it, to those who construe 
it and interpret it, and further still to those 
who would evade or avoid it. And this is true 
alike of all corporations, whatever their aim or 
purpose. If here I have referred only to one 
or two classes of them, the principles which I 
have maintained are pertinent to all the rest. 
Those to whom I speak will have been more 
fortunate than I have been if, in connection, 
6.^., with what are called religious corporations 
they have not sometimes encountered condi- 
tions and policies which it seemed impossible 
to reconcile with the highest dictates of either 
honesty or morality, as when the funds of such 

195 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

corporations are made use of for private profit, 
or the incomes they received derived from 
property leased or under-leased for infamous 
purposes. To plead ignorance in such cases is 
to confess criminality; for such ignorance can 
be described in no other terms. 

Now, the significant feature of a situation so 
deplorable as this is that it presents a singular 
and unwonted inversion of what I may call the 
usual law of demoralization. As ordinarily 
it operates, that law begins with the relaxation 
of standards in those who are assumed to be 
the social and moral exemplars of their time, 
the disciples of religion and its official repre- 
sentatives,— ^^^/^e^e in time of temptation fall 
away," and their lapses are made the excuse 
or the justification for theirs whose professions 
and positions are inferior or wholly negative. 
But, in the case of modern corporate misman- 
agement or breach of trust, I think it could un- 
doubtedly be shown that, where a high standard 
of administration in religious corporations 
has existed, it has often been lowered by the in- 
troduction into their direction of those who had 
no other claim to be there save that they had 
been successful financiers in connection with 

196 



THE CORPORATION 

projects and properties whose history was 
often not only shady bnt discreditable. And 
this has come to pass because, as the author of 
the ^^ Political Economy of Humanism"^ has 
forcibly put it, ^^Directorial abuses are not only 
common, but subtle, plausible, and insinuating, 
so as to obscure and almost eclipse axiomatic 
moral principles which are older than the 
decalogue. The public conscience is so accus- 
tomed to directorial manipulation, and skilful 
and prolific ingenuity on the part of officials, 
more especially those of the average railroad, 
that they are almost expected as a matter of 
course. To be on the "inside' is often as good 
as a fortune assured. Unscrupulous manage- 
ment is regarded only as ^shrewd financier- 
ing,' and even as ^brilliant,' so long as it 
escapes technical and legal cognizance and pun- 
ishment. Instead of earnest condemnation 
from the public press, it often calls out criti- 
cism only of a flippant or facetious character. 
Its direct consequences may be seen in great 
congested, unearned fortunes, in a lax public 
conscience, in the (considerable) distrust with 
which the foreign world regards the average 

1 '^Politieal Eeonomv of Humanism/^ 
Heiiiy Wood, p. 248. 

197 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

American railway managemeiit, and in the 
transformation of a legitimate stock investment 
business into one of a gambling character." 
And here follow words which connect the 
whole subject with that aspect of the larger 
one which I am discussing, and which are 
of the most tragic truth and import: ''It 
furnishes the text and vantage-ground of 
every anarchist, socialist, and would-be de- 
stroyer of our present social order.'' Of that 
there can be no smallest doubt. The last utter- 
ance that I have read from much the most con- 
spicuous champion of social revolution dis- 
cusses a recent proposition— that of profit-shar- 
ing—for drawing working men and corpora- 
tions more closely together, as simply a shrewd 
and clever device on the part of corporations 
and those who represent them for maintaining 
a situation in which the working man may, as 
heretofore, be effectively deprived of his just 
earnings. 

There are partial remedies for such a con- 
dition of things, which are easily within our 
reach, and which it is the duty of good citizen- 
ship to demand. A pertinent analogy to the 
present situation in regard to great business 

198 



THE CORPORATION 

corporations may be found in our more recent 
administration of public charities; and since 
such corporations hold their charter from the 
state, and are secured in certain privileges by 
civil enactment, there could be no unwarranta- 
ble invasion of the privacy of the individual. 
It was found, some years ago, that the condi- 
tions in some of the public institutions of 
charity in the city in which I live were simply 
monstrous, and that infamies and corruptions 
had obtained in them for a long series of years, 
with the entire cognizance and acquiescence of 
official inspectors and the like. Under these 
circumstances, a few of us initiated a movement 
for forcing open the doors of such institutions 
and disclosing the acts of their employes to 
the public eye. I need not describe here the 
processes, by legal enactment and otherwise, 
through which this was accomplished. It is 
enough to say that it has wrought, in hospitals, 
jails, and asylums, a revolution which will lose 
its force and efficacy only when the public 
sentiment behind it grows cold or indifferent. 
And here some one may see the pertinency of 
such an illustration to the subject which I am 
now discussing. How far are the secret and 

199 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

furtive and often deliberately misleading poli- 
cies and practices of corporate management 
consistent with, the wholesome conservation of 
public morals? The writer from whom I have 
just quoted suggests^ in this connection, that, 
in order to attain an end of such paramount 
importance as that, the citizen should invoke 
the law, and that the law should provide, e.g. : 

First: The compulsory issuing of monthly 
reports in a uniform manner, and after a pre- 
scribed formula; the correctness of which 
should be affirmed on the oath of one or more 
directors, adding thereto such explanatory mat- 
ter as the management might deem necessary. 

Second: A periodical outside audit by gov- 
ernmental examiners or professional accoun- 
tants, duly qualified and sworn for this special 
service, on some plan similar to that used in 
the case of national banks. 

Third: Construe as bribery the receiving 
of any commissions or presents by any auditor, 
purchasing agent, or official, which are given 
because of official position. 

Fourth: That it shall be illegal, with heavy 
penalties, for corporate officials to speculate 
in their own stock, directly or indirectly. 

200 



THE CORPORATION 

Undoubtedly such legal provisions would be 
regarded in some quarters as an invasion of 
private rights ; but, as the writer from whom I 
have just quoted concludes, ''a sound political 
economy teaches that individual freedom must 
give way to collective freedom, and that the 
will of society is paramount to personal will."^ 

And that consideration it is, when seen in its 
highest lights, that lifts this whole subject to 
its true plane. The individual is forever talk- 
ing of his rights. But a question which takes 
precedence of his rights is the question. What 
are his duties? The Being who has been in 
the world for the purpose of instituting a di- 
vine society made plain enough to all men the 
principles on which it was to rest, and they 
were never those of self-interest, but always 
those of self-surrender. ^^Look not every man 
on his own things, ' ' says the apostle, paraphras- 
ing his Master's law, ^^but every man on the 
things of others ' ' ; and if anything at all is clear 
concerning the mission of Jesus Christ to men, 
it is that he came to build here the temple of a 
regenerated society in obedience to the law of 
righteousness and love; to restore the divine 

1 *^ Political Economy of Humanism," p. 251. 

201 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

equities; to rebuild the temples of justice, so 
that the humblest feet might enter into them; 
and over all human activities to arch the bow 
of a divine promise to those who loved their 
neighbors as themselves. Do I hear some one 
say that such a rule, however excellent it may 
be in our individual dealings with our fellow- 
men, has no place in, and can by no ingenuity 
be worked into, the fabric of a modern corpora- 
tion? Why not? At what point does asso- 
ciated action cease to have a moral quality? 
AVhat is the meaning of those old and clear 
words, ^^Thou shalt not follow a multitude to 
do evil,'' and again, ^^ Though hand join in 
hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished"? 
It is precisely the implied assertion of this 
moral irresponsibility on the part of corpora- 
tions which threatens not only to put the great- 
est strain upon our institutions, but to destroy 
in the hearts of the masses all faith in a God 
who is the God of those who can acquiesce in, 
or connive at, or consent to be enriched by, 
practices and policies which transgress the 
plain principles of common honesty and equity. 
And so we see in this connection our high and 
solemn calling who are citizens. Where cor- 

202 



THE CORPORATION 

porate action touches the lives, the health, the 
mental or pecuniary loss or gain of the working 
man, it must be brought to realize that it is a 
steward not only accountable to men, but most 
of all to God. The hard hand of capital, press- 
ing out of the working man the utmost of his 
strength and time, and taking no thought, and 
giving no means or chance for the betterment 
of his physical or mental condition, is not a 
seemly spectacle nor a witness to righteous 
standards. We are wont, many of us, to con- 
sider the demands of wage-earners as oftener 
than otherwise unreasonable and exaggerated; 
and yet in a letter which came to me the other 
day from a large employer of labor, he said, 
in connection with some remarks upon a recent 
issue between workmen and their employers, 
^^As to strikes between operatives and employ- 
ers, for wages, hours of labor, etc., one of our 
most prominent silk manufacturers said to me 
the other day, ^You may set it down as a rule 
that such strikes are, in nearly every case, the 
manufacturers' own fault.' " No words of 
larger promise have been spoken in the whole 
controversy between corporations and work- 
men,— not at all merely because they confess 

203 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

error in some particular instances, but because, 
with a single touch, they lift all controversies 
between corporations and workmen into the 
light of the eternal equities. 

Held there, there is hope for the ultimate 
transformation of the corporation into a trans- 
parent and benignant exemplar of the laws of 
human brotherhood. No genius of organiza- 
tion, no cleverness of administration, no vast- 
ness of proportions need fail out of it. The 
danger of trusts is not in their mere bulk, but 
in the menace of their uncontrolled and unre- 
strained bulk. The evil of the corporation is 
not in its mechanism or its proportions, but in 
its temper and its morals. In the last analysis 
it is a question simply of standards. A great 
public man in England, bitterly attacked by 
his political enemies, stood up one day before 
a vast assemblage that had greeted him with 
howls and hisses, and, holding up his hands 
before them all, cried out, ^^ These hands are 
clean!" and no man dared contradict him. 
We want such a challenge, and such a corpo- 
rate honesty and integrity behind it, from those 
great mechanisms of organized wealth which, 
despite the dishonor which has stained some 

204 



THE CORPORATION 

among them, have wrought such wonders and 
earned such honorable repute in our republic. 
But it must come first through the individual. 
Corporations have, indeed, no souls. But 
those who compose them have consciences ; and 
these they must bring to the standard of a di- 
vine righteousness, to be touched by its quick- 
ening hand, to be illumined by its spirit, and 
then to bear witness, in king's palaces, at 
board meetings, at directors' meetings, not 
fearing the face of man, because they have 
heard the voice of God. 



205 



VI 

THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

IT has been the object of that discussion 
which this lecture will conclude to bring 
within the horizon of our thought those rela- 
tions to society, and especially to society under 
the conditions of modern industrial activity, 
which man sustains, first, as an individual, and 
then as voluntarily incorporated for some par- 
ticular business or calling. But, besides these 
relations, there is another, not voluntary but 
largely involuntary, which transcends them 
both, and that is to the state. Those successive 
steps which I have already traced, and which 
are in fact the story of civilization, are most 
of all interesting because they disclose to us 
how tribes or families which once had in them 
no more enduring elements than so many Bed- 
ouin Arabs, climbed at last to permanence and 
power. The family, the tribe, the predatory 

206 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

band of vagrant hunters or warriors ceased 
at last to be nomads and vagabonds, and be- 
came a people. And whoever they were, and 
wherever, and whenever this came to pass, it 
was always, practically, in one way. The chief 
became a ruler, and the rule became something 
else and more than a personal whim. Law took 
the place of caprice; justice reigned, however 
crudely and imperfectly, instead of mere im- 
pulse; person and property acquired recog- 
nized rights; processes were devised for de- 
termining and maintaining them ; and so, how- 
ever inadequately and f ragmentarily, there 
were the beginnings of a state. 

What are its duties and responsibilities to- 
day? what are the duties to it of students and 
scholars to-day? and how far, especially,— for 
that is the question with which, most of all, these 
lectures are concerned— should those duties 
which are the state's be enlarged or limited 
with reference to the industrial problems of our 
own time? If to some of these questions we 
may. find no more than a partial answer, we 
shall, I think, be at any rate better equipped 
for grave tasks, and it may be grave crises, 
that are before us; and I do not need to re- 

207 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

mind you that we shall be best equipped for 
such tasks if we seek to approach them in the 
light of the words and the works of One who, 
whether as a teacher or a citizen, is the unique 
figure in history. 

And when we do so, the first thing that im- 
presses us is, that when Jesus came into con- 
tact with the state, his only attitude to it, its 
laws, its courts, its executive, was wholly pas- 
sive and acquiescent. The full force of this 
fact has been but very imperfectly recognized. 
Has it ever occurred to you how much more im- 
pressive to the popular imagination it would 
have been had it been otherwise? Before his 
birth, Joseph and his mother Mary went up to 
Jerusalem to be taxed. But consider the star- 
tling and dramatic effect that would have been 
produced when, e,g.^ as we read in St. Mat- 
thew's gospel, ^Hhey that received the half- 
shekel came to Peter, and said. Doth not your 
Master pay the half-shekel?"^— that is, the tem- 
ple tribute, or, as Weiseler suggests,^ possibly 
the Eoman census, or poll-tax,— if Jesus him- 
self had brushed Peter aside and said, with 

1 St. Matthew, xvii, 25. 

2 See ''The Life and Times of Jesus/^ Edersheim, Vol. II, 
p. 112, note. 

208 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

august and imperial mien, ^^Most surely not! 
Shall a sovereign pay tribute to his subjects T' 
On the contrary, what Jesus in fact does is, 
first, to point out with utmost gentleness to 
Peter and the rest the groundlessness of the 
claim. ^^What thinkest thou, Simon? the kings 
of the earth, from whom do they receive toll or 
tribute? from their sons, or from strangers? '^ 
Or, in other words, ^^If this is a tax imposed 
by divine authority, shall the Son of Man who 
imposes it be subject to it?" which was a suffi- 
ciently explicit affirmation that His Father's 
Son could not properly be subject to any such 
demand; but then, straightway, ^^But, lest we 
cause them to stumble, go thou to the sea, and 
cast a hook, and take up the fish that first com- 
eth up ; and when thou hast opened his mouth, 
thou shalt find a shekel: that take, and give 
unto them for me and thee.'' That is to say, 
^^All things are mine, and are subject to the 
constraint of my will. In paying this tax 
that shall be made plain beyond a peradven- 
ture. But lest, by a refusal to honor the de- 
mand, we cause others to stumble— lest, that 
is to say, by my disregard of a law which has 
here universal honor, I cause men to associate 

209 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

with my message and kingdom a contempt for 
law, see tliou that we conform to it. ' ' 

There is even a much more significant illus- 
tration of the same principle in connection with 
the closing hours of Jesus, the vast and endur- 
ing suggestions of which have, I think, been 
but very imperfectly recognized. Preceding 
the crucifixion there were, as a matter of fact, 
as you will remember, four distinct trials or 
hearings in the case of Jesus: first, before 
Annas and Caiaphas ; then before Pilate ; then 
before Herod; and then, finally, again before 
the Eoman governor. Has it never occurred to 
you what a unique and incomparable opportu- 
nity was presented, in connection with these, for 
a display of such power and authority as would 
have smitten each miserable court, in turn, with 
abject shame and ignominy, if, one after an- 
other, Jesus had put them each aside, and gone 
forward on his way, as king of angels and of 
men, as indeed He was, ^^ thrones and princi- 
palities and powers being subject unto Him," 
—in sublime and utter scorn of all human tri- 
bunals? 

But no; as, one after another, they arraign 
him, he has naught to say. As from one au- 

210 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

thority to another, ecclesiastical, regal, impe- 
rial, lie is dragged to appear in succession, he 
lifts no resisting or detaining hand, but simply 
waits the issue. 

We have here, I venture to maintain, a dis- 
closure of the relation of Christ and his reli- 
gion to the state which lies at the foundation 
of this whole discussion. Than the corruption 
both of church and state when Christ entered 
the world there is perhaps little that is worse 
in human history. The one was mercenary, 
formal, and hypocritical; and the other was 
cruel, wanton, and tyrannical. And, when mov- 
ing to and fro amid conditions such as these, 
Jesus utters no more decisive or revolutionary 
words than ^'Render unto Csssar the things 
that are Caesar's"; ^^Thou couldst have no 
power unless it were given thee from above," — 
language which, if it means anything, means 
that the magistrate sits upon his seat under the 
authority of a divine ordinance, which bids all 
men everywhere respect the sceptre as the em- 
blem of a divine order,— it is impossible to 
ignore the force of his words and acts. 

What then, it may be asked, was and is the 
relation of the religion of Jesus Christ to the 

211 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

state? Is it simply to sit by and see wrong 
done and sin condoned and cruelty crowned, 
and reach out no hand to pull it from its 
throne? Yes, so far as overt act is concerned, 
hard as the saying may sound, it is. What the 
individual citizen is to do, or the people of a 
state on its way to ruin under the leadership 
of blind or corrupt rulers, is quite another 
question. But for the church, as the incarna- 
tion of the spirit and purpose of the supreme 
Master of men, there is another and a better 
way. It is to penetrate the civil order with its 
divine spirit. It is to transform the secular 
mind by the spell, in it and on it, of the divine 
mind. It is to regenerate character, not to 
break laws. It is, in one word, to re-create the 
social fabric by the bringing into it of a new 
soul. 

How hard it has been for the church to real- 
ize this, I do not need to remind you. It had 
gone but a short distance upon its way before 
we find it grasping at external power, and aping 
the airs and pomps of earthly courts. The lat- 
ter came before the former; and the steps by 
which the church passed from its earlier sim- 
plicity to its mediaeval tawdriness and secular 

212 



•THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

ostentations, exist as enduring warnings that 
the secret of its triumphs does not reside in 
things outward. But whichever it was, cere- 
monial or the greed of power, that in this nox- 
ious and enervating growth preceded the other, 
the two marched, ere long, side by side. 

Over against a folly so utter and persistent 
as this, which, wherever its votaries go, in all 
lands and under whatever pretexts, inspires 
them most of all in grasping after political 
power and intriguing at the back doors of 
sovereigns and senates to get the ear and 
influence the acts of the dispensers of plunder 
or patronage, stands the figure of Jesus saying 
to man, ^^My kingdom is not of this world, '^ 
and ^^The kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation. ' ^ 

But, if not, how then, does it come ; or, to put 
the question in a form which is still more con- 
crete and definite, AVhat is your duty and mine, 
as citizens, to the state? I shall endeavor, first 
of all, to answer this question in more general 
terms, and then with reference more especially 
to those industrial problems with which it is 
the office of these lectures to concern them- 
selves. In order to do this, however, it is ob- 

213 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

yionsly necessary to begin by defining the office 
and function of the state itself; becanse, until 
we have some clear conception of these, it will 
be impossible to determine our own obligations 
to that organism for which they stand. We 
have already seen, be it remembered, that as 
an individual is an entity, so in a very real 
though by no means identical sense a corpo- 
ration is an entity. It has a being, functions, 
responsibilities. And these attributes belong 
no less to a state. Whether we use that term 
in its widest or its narrowest sense, whether 
as describing an empire or a commonwealth, 
the state is a body corporate, sustaining a more 
or less clearly defined relation to other bodies 
corporate, and properly charged with certain 
definite responsibilities. It must protect the 
citizen in his just rights ; it must maintain re- 
lations of equity and comity with its neighbors ; 
it must promote the common well-being by ex- 
ercising an authority which sometimes tran- 
scends and supersedes private rights, as when, 
for instance, it acts under the provision of the 
law of eminent domain; it must safeguard the 
public health and public highways; and, be- 
yond these things, it may undertake and dis- 

214 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

charge certain additional responsibilities, snch, 
e.g. J as that of public education, which experi- 
ence has proven to be most advantageous to the 
common welfare. 

The question, however, which arises at this 
point, and which, especially under our modern 
social conditions, more urgently presses for an 
answer, is. How much farther in these direc- 
tions may the state wisely go ? As one remedy 
for what many regard as the undue and dispro- 
portionate growth of wealth in private hands, 
it has been suggested, as I need not remind 
you, that the state should take over certain 
businesses, as already it undertakes the busi- 
ness of collecting, carrying, and distribut- 
ing the mails, and conduct them, not for the 
benefit of certain private stockholders, but for 
the benefit of the state itself. In Sweden, as 
one solution of the drink problem, the state has 
assumed the business of the sale of intoxicating 
liquors ; and with an eye not so much directly 
to the public enrichment because of the profits 
of such business, as indirectly to regulate and 
restrict it, in the higher interests of the con- 
sumer. I may not tarry here to discuss the 
sociological advantages of such a system, 

215 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

which, as we know, enjoys the confidence of 
many well-informed and thoughtful people. 
The instance is, at this point, chiefly of interest 
as raising the same question concerning all 
businesses. If other things consumed by hu- 
man society are not in their nature of such pos- 
sibly mischievous influences, yet if impure in 
their manufacture and reckless in their distri- 
bution, it is, after all, of real and it may be of 
very grave consequence that, concerning them, 
some legal oversight and authority should be 
exercised. If I may ruin myself by drinking 
too much bad whiskey, I may poison myself by 
eating bad bread ; and the question of the purity 
and nutritive qualities of this last may be said 
to be, so far as the vast majority of people are 
concerned, a question of immeasurably greater 
consequence. Still further, it may be urged, if 
there is force in this argument,— and for my 
own part I confess I cannot see how its force 
can be altogether ignored,— why may it not be 
applied to a great many other interests which 
are practically those of the whole community, 
and concerning dangers from which the com- 
munity is, in the great majority of instances, 
wholly powerless to protect itself? No one can 

216 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

at this distance review the reasoning which was 
employed at the time of the great industrial 
revolution in England by even the most distin- 
guished representatives of the doctrine of lais- 
sez faire, the doctrine, in other words, that, in 
the matters, e.g., of wages, hours of labor, child 
labor, fraudulent adulterations, etc., things 
must be left to take care of themselves, and the 
equities involved in them be left to settle them- 
selves under the domain of the great god of sup- 
ply and demand,— without owning that Dr. Cro- 
zier's burst of scorn, in his ^^ History of Intel- 
lectual Development," is not wholly unwar- 
ranted when in this particular connection he 
says,^ ^^ Because caveat emptor is in general a 
sound business maxim, and because it is expe- 
dient that the buyer should be wide awake, 
shifty, and self-reliant, and should take the 
risk in all ordinary business of bargain and 
sale, John Bright . . . would turn red with 
indignation at the suggestion that the consumer 
should be protected by public authority against 
injurious or fraudulent adulterations, not only 
of commodities generally, but of food and drink 
as well ; and rather than that you should violate 

1 '^History of Intellectual Development/' J.B.Crozier, m, 65-6G. 

217 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

the sacred principle of laissez faire, he would 
have you carry the whole science of chemistry 
in your single head, and when you went to make 
your purchases you must either take about with 
you a complete outfit of test-tubes, gauges, and 
re-agents with which to institute analyses on 
the spot, or consent to adulterations that should 
even go to the length of poisoning you ! ' ' 

The reductio ad ahsurdum here, I maintain, 
is both logical and adequate. If it be the duty 
of the state to the individual to erect a street 
lamp at the corner, so that the thief who may 
lurk there shall not rob him with impunity ; or, 
if he should do so, to hire a policeman to arrest 
the thief (if by any miracle of chance the po- 
liceman himself be anywhere else than in a 
neighboring saloon), it is difficult to see how 
the guardianship, the care, the beneficence, if 
you choose to call it so, of the state in behalf 
of the individual should not, in various direc- 
tions of a kindred character, be equally ex- 
tended. If the theory of the state, which, if 
I understand it, is the theory of an organized 
society in which certain functions for the com- 
mon well-being are taken over from private 
hands and discharged by that corporate entity 

218 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

which represents them all,— if such a theory, 
as it has illustrated itself in generations of what 
we are wont to describe as advancing civiliza- 
tion, is a valid theory, then, at any rate, it is 
a competent subject for our most serious con- 
sideration how far and in what directions we 
shall extend it. The things that I have named 
by way of illustration, or things like them, we 
already do. Wliy along the same line should 
we not proceed farther? We have hospitals 
for the sick, the blind, the lame, and asylums 
for the orphan, the incurable, and the insane; 
why should we not have hotels to which a fam- 
ily with an incompetent woman as housekeeper, 
wasteful, indolent, or ignorant, may resort and 
become the charge of the state? An experi- 
enced observer of modern life will tell you that 
such a situation is one of the most fruitful 
causes of intemperance. He will prove to you, 
by statistics, if necessary, that in a great 
number of cases the head of a family so situ- 
ated has, because of it, found his way to the 
saloon and become a common drunkard and 
pauper, and his family paupers with him ; and 
he will undertake to prove to you, also by sta- 
tistics, that it would have cost the state less 

219 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

to have taken over this man and his family and 
supported them for life, than it has cost it to 
punish him and his children for their crimes, 
the product of their father's intemperance: to 
pay the judge who tried him, the lawyers who 
prosecuted him, the jury who convicted him, 
and the cost of the jail and the jailers who im- 
prisoned him. 

Or again, here is a youth who, tempted by the 
vice of a great city, gives himself the rein in all 
indulgences that soon breed in him their appro- 
priate crop of loathsome diseases, and end at 
last in a horrible death. But, before that hor- 
rible end, this leprous thing has become a cen- 
tre of appalling infection, and in a long trail 
of disease and physical disability and moral 
ruin, falling often upon the innocent and un- 
suspecting, has spread its loathsome length 
over an indefinite area of misery and shame. 
All this, the disciples of a new type of socialism 
tell us, could be prevented by methods which, 
if the state only legalized and administered 
them, would be of sure and unerring efficacy. 

There is a moral aspect of such a case which 
I shall not tarry here to refer to further than 
to say that it involves a distinct endeavor to 

220 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

defeat, by human cleverness, a divine penalty. 
In its social aspect, however, it falls at once 
within the lines which condemn a whole multi- 
tude of injurious methods of relieving the in- 
dividual from a sense of personal responsi- 
bility. It is just here, as a matter of fact, that 
we touch that which is, after all, central to the 
whole discussion. What is that for which you 
and I and the rest of mankind are here in the 
world? If it be to create the constitution of a 
social order from which everything that is in- 
dividual shall be dismissed, and everything 
that we possess in common only shall be con- 
served, then plainly two results must follow: 
first, that only that shall be conserved which in 
society is of least value, at any rate according 
to any standard that is either intellectual or 
moral, since such qualities are not common but 
rare, and must inevitably perish under any sys- 
tem which destroys individua^lity ; and again, 
that in the process of creating a social order 
that transfers responsibility from the indi- 
vidual to the state, you have provided a sure 
and certain method of annihilating, through its 
persistent enervation, that only and supreme 
force by which states live at all. A man of 

221 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

genius in the financial world said to me, not 
long ago : ' ' People often say to me in the busi- 
ness world, ^ Young men are not, in our experi- 
ence of them, what they were fifty years ago ' ; 
but when I ask them if they are not as intelli- 
gent, as industrious, as temperate, they an- 
swer, ' It is not exactly that, ' and go no farther. 
They do not quite know how to define a diJtfer- 
ence of which elderly men are nevertheless 
quite sensible; but in fact there is nothing ob- 
scure in the situation;— the modern young man 
lacks initiative ; he has been, if anything, over- 
educated and conventionalized." The incident 
is chiefly of consequence as it points to a cause 
for the chief difference between the modern 
young man and his predecessors as in the mat- 
ter of resources. His are almost indefinitely 
greater, and his environment greatly more fa- 
vorable—and more enervating. Now, when 
you come to deal with the problem of the state 
and what it owes to the individual, here is a 
factor which you cannot possibly leave out of 
account. It is entirely possible that the state 
might, without undue waste or loss to itself, un- 
dertake a great many tasks and burdens which, 
as society is at present constituted, fall to the 

222 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

individual; but the foremost question in con- 
nection with such action must be, What, finally, 
will be the effect of such a policy upon the in- 
dividual? You may constitute a social order 
in which there shall be no rough angles, no 
unguarded pitfalls, no summons to privation 
or hardship; but when you have perfected it, 
where will you find the men to administer iti 
These are not made that way ; and the automatic 
social order remains yet to be discovered. 

These considerations, which point mainly in 
one direction, will nevertheless prepare us for 
the discussion of those which look in quite an- 
other. The state is, or may be, not only a guar- 
dian but an employer ; and the principles of its 
constitution and the function of its life are of 
supreme interest to-day because they are, or 
ought to be, as great multitudes believe, the 
matters of her chief concern. In connection, 
in other words, with the friction of warfare 
between the capitalist and the working man, 
there has risen up a school of reformers who 
assure us that the only solution of the present 
social problem of mutual unrest and hostility 
lies in a reorganization of labor under the sole 
control and administration of the state. I 

223 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

need not now enter into questions of original 
ownership of land or plants ; it is at least con- 
ceivable that the state might be the universal 
lessee,— the owner being paid a minimum per- 
centage, and the state fixing the scale of wages, 
engaging the laborer, and discharging the 
whole work of contract and oversight. Of 
course, the chief design in such a system would 
be to ensure continuous as opposed to spasmodic 
employment, and a fixed rate of wage. But 
those who have devised this scheme have never 
shown to us under what system of economics it 
is feasible. I believe it has been substantially 
accepted as the final truth, in the matter of 
work and wages, that these must needs depend 
upon consumption. But the matter of con- 
sumption is beyond the control of the state. 
If the farmer in Kansas has no wheat to sell, 
he has no coin with which to buy ; no ingenuity 
on the part of the state can make up to him 
for a hiatus extending over two or three barren 
years. Production then must stop, because con- 
sumption has stopped; and while the state 
may parry such a situation by various tempo- 
rary expedients, it must at last recognize and 
confront it. 

224 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

And, even if it were otherwise, that other 
and still graver alternative which I have 
already suggested would inevitably occur. 
^^When men are established" (in the employ 
of the government), says the financial secre- 
tary of the British Admiralty, Mr. Forward, 
in his evidence as to the state employment of 
laborers, referring to working men in the em- 
ploy of the government, ^^they have secured 
to themselves a continuance of employment; 
and therefore the same inducement to diligent, 
active work does not present itself as in the 
case of the hired men who, if they fail to be 
industrious, are liable to be discharged. " It is 
the invariable tendency, witnessed to by the 
enormous cost of public improvements wher- 
ever they have been undertaken by the state, 
of any such system to be both prodigal in its ex- 
penditure and corrupting in its influence. In 
countries like England and Germany, where the 
supervision of public expenditure is far more 
vigilant than in our own, this has been con- 
sistently the experience ; and indeed a conspicu- 
ous labor leader in England not long ago un- 
reservedly admitted it. ^^An improvement,'' 
he says, ^^must take place in human nature be- 

225 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

fore any wide extension of state or municipal 
employment of labor would be desirable. . . . 
Common control without the motive of self- 
interest can only satisfactorily take the place 
of sectional control for private gain when pub- 
lic opinion has reached a higher level of mo- 
rality, and the inducement to discharge one's 
duties in a manly fashion and from a point of 
honor is sufficiently strong as an incentive to 
industry. ' ' 

It is at this point that the whole question of 
the bettering of the condition of the working 
man impinges upon that of the policy of the 
capitalist in his relations to the state. How, 
thus far, for what ends, and in what way, has 
the capitalist made use of the state, and how 
far has he invoked its authority or its law- 
making power in the interests of the working 
man? It is when we turn this page in the his- 
tory of modern industrialism that we come 
upon some of the least creditable characteris- 
tics of our common humanity. That distin- 
guished advocate of the doctrine of laissez 
faire in such connections, Mr. John Bright, 
was the coryphaeus of a great multitude of 
capitalists and employers, to whose blind and 

226 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

selfish policy in dealing with the working 
classes the strained and inflamed relations of 
the two to-day have been largely due. The 
rapid development of great industries at the 
end of the eighteenth century ^'gave rise," as 
Mr. Geoffrey Drage has impressively pointed 
out/ ^^to the two classes of men, the modern 
employer and the modern workman. The old 
personal relation between employer and em- 
ployed, which was possible when industry had 
been carried on on a small scale, had been al- 
most destroyed. A new race of employers 
grew up. These were for the most part self- 
made men who were strangers to the etiquette, 
family traditions, and moral considerations 
which impose some restraint on hereditary 
wealth. The old industrial regulations for the 
protection of the working man only hampered 
the development of the new industry. Their 
evasion, and finally their total abolition, was 
rendered possible by the fact that the local ad- 
ministration of the law, in the manufacturing 
districts, was largely in the hands of the em- 
ployers themselves. Both the judicial system 
and the administrative system were unfavora- 

1 '^ The Labour Problem/' Geoffrey Drage, chapter IV. 

227 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

ble to the working classes. The employer who 
exercised the fnnctions of local government 
was not united to the working classes by the 
patriarchal tie which had formerly inflnenced 
the squire. . . . Complaints were made on 
every side of the arbitrary and partial conduct 
of the justices. The workman was treated with 
roughness and brutality. . . . The judicial 
system, although not so directly in the hands 
of the employers as the local administration 
and the jurisdiction exercised by the justices, 
nevertheless showed the same tendency. . . . 
Under these conditions the working classes 
were practically in a condition of slavery. 
New machinery was continually introduced, and 
men were consequently thrown out of work, wo- 
men and children being employed at reduced 
wages in their stead. In the evidence given 
before an English Parliamentary Committee, 
^instances were given of the employment of 
children who were so young that they had to 
be carried to the factory, or who were kept 
awake at their work during the night by blows. 
Mention was made of children who were so 
exhausted after their work that the food had 
to be put to their mouths, and of others who 

228 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

were sold to the employer by the parish authori- 
ties out of the foundling hospitals. The same 
disgraceful state of things prevailed among the 
women who were employed in the place of 
men. Out of 419,590 factory hands there were 
192,887 under eighteen years of age, . . . and 
the number of male adults at work in the fac- 
tories was less than a quarter of the whole 
number. The evil results, both physical and 
moral, were so grave as to be regarded in the 
light of a national disgrace, and were described 
as disgusting and brutal. ' ' ' Similar conditions 
prevailed in connection with ^^the employment 
of women and children in collieries and mines, 
and ... in the case of men in various other in- 
dustries, such as shipping." Dr. Baernreither, 
in his volume on ^'English Associations of 
Working Men,'' speaks of the incredible 
abuses which existed in the shipping indus- 
try, owing largely to the greed of the unscru- 
pulous owners, and consisting in sending un- 
seaworthy ships to sea in order to make a profit 
out of their loss by means of over-insurance. 
Speaking of this period. Dr. Baernreither says 
in the same volume: ^^The modern history of 
the West records, perhaps, no greater plun- 

229 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

dering of man by man, than that which was 
then committed against a large number of the 
English working class. . . . The unrestricted 
employment of women, girls, and children de- 
stroyed family life, and not only degraded 
whole classes of working people to an extent 
almost past belief, but crushed at once all hope 
of the rising generation.'^ 

I do not forget that, in that heroic movement 
in England for the correction of these evils, the 
foremost supporters of factory legislation were 
Sir Robert Peel the elder, and Robert Owen, 
two of the greatest employers of the time. But 
the man to whom the initiation of the whole re- 
form was owing was Lord Ashley, afterward 
Lord Shaftesbury, who, being outside of the 
whole situation, was able to see its colossal evils 
and mischiefs with an impartial eye, which, 
until his indignant denunciations roused them, 
not even these great factory owners were able 
to turn upon it. The volume by Mr. George 
Gunton, ^^ Wealth and Progress," to which I 
have elsewhere referred, furnishes abundant 
evidence of the same condition of things in our 
own land until a few brave men and women 
in New England recognized its horrors and 

230 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

strove to rouse their fellows to its shame. And 
it is just at this point that the relation of the 
state to the whole subject becomes plain; be- 
cause it was not until the employer was com- 
pelled by the state to recognize and remedy 
them that, as a rule, these cruelties and injus- 
tices were equitably dealt with. Now, a sound 
public opinion may operate in two ways. It 
may act upon the mind and conscience of the 
employer, by convincing him of his duty in the 
matter of his stewardship of life and character 
in the persons of his workpeople; or, it may 
act upon others, even though he remain insen- 
sible to it, so far as to produce in legislation 
the necessary remedial constraints. Undoubt- 
edly the former is the better way. But the 
state exists not only as an educator, but also as 
a wholesome compulsion ; and when some of us 
are disposed to resent the invasions, as we be- 
lieve, of personal liberty in present or pro- 
posed legislation as to conditions and hours of 
labor, and the like, we must go back in our 
search for the initial responsibility to the em- 
ployer or the capitalist. These represent, or 
are supposed to represent, our higher intelli- 
gence. These hold in their hands, to an enor- 

231 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

mous degree, the determinative power. These 
are supposed to be not insensible to the re- 
straints of a humane chivalry. Noblesse oblige! 
How far do any such considerations seem to 
have influenced them? And if they have not, 
can it be wondered that those whose lives are 
hard and empty, and whose muscles are pre- 
maturely stiff with excessive toil, should re- 
member that they hold in their hands one 
weapon— the ballot— which can compel the 
recognition of what they believe to be their 
rights? When one goes back over the story of 
the working man during the century that has 
just ended, what is the most tragic and impres- 
sive fact that it presents for our consideration? 
It is this: that all along, from first to last, 
whether in other countries or our own, those 
things that have been conceded to the working 
man for his protection and betterment— the 
prohibition of child labor, the sanitation of fac- 
tories, the restriction of the work hours of 
women, and the like— were wrung originally 
from the employer by law, and rarely or never 
granted voluntarily. It is indeed different to- 
day ; and the modern employer of labor has had 
demonstrated to him by the indisputable argu- 

232 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

ment of experience that restrictive and benefi- 
cent measures in behalf of working men are 
' ' good business, ' ' and is himself adopting those 
measures from economic if not from benevo- 
lent motives. And so the apostle's words have 
found, in the modern industrial world, a new 
and most dramatic fulfilment; and the law has 
been a schoolmaster to bring the reluctant em- 
ployer, little as he may recognize it, to the rec- 
ognition of those great principles of human 
brotherhood which are of the very essence of 
the divinest Teacher who has ever spoken to 
men. 

And thus we come abreast of a very high of- 
fice of the state in the modern industrial world, 
and that is as an educator, and, in that connec- 
tion, of the responsibilities of good citizen- 
ship. A review of the history of a year 's legis- 
lation in any great commonwealth such as this, 
would have, in this connection, a very sugges- 
tive value. For it would be found, I apprehend, 
that the greater part of that legislation was for 
purposes that are largely commercial or finan- 
cial ; the organization of corporations, the safe- 
guarding of great business interests, and the 
like ; and a very secondary part of it for these 

233 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

higher purposes which safeguard the interest 
of the individual, and especially those who are 
weakest and least able to secure a hearing for 
themselves. It is for these, supremely, that you 
and I should be concerned. Wealth can take 
care of itself; but it is he who, as the toiler at 
the bottom of the social structure, is most easily 
forgotten or overlooked, who needs your inter- 
position and mine. And the state as the law- 
giver for the weak and defenceless fulfils its 
sublimest function. 

The bearing of all this upon the question of 
the character and the competency of those 
whose office it is to represent the state as its offi- 
cial functionaries must at this point occur to us, 
and is of paramount importance. In connection 
with industrial legislation it has been found 
that the most perfect law may be defeated if its 
execution depends upon a corrupt official; and 
the history of some of our greater cities and 
commonwealths is a tragic demonstration of the 
worthlessness of the best legislation, if the exe- 
cution of the law is vested in incompetent or 
dishonest hands. It is at this point that pub- 
lic-spirited citizenship has the opportunity to 
render the greatest service to the state, and by 

234 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

means of that service to make the state the 
most powerful of all human factors for truth 
and righteousness. A good law in the hands 
of a bad man is even a less effective weapon 
than a bad law in the hands oi' a good man. 
But if, instead of either of these, you can cre- 
ate a situation in which good laws are vested 
for their administration in the hands of good 
men, then you have a situation which in its es- 
sence is divine. For, after all, though we call 
ours a constitutional and not a paternal gov- 
ernment, the most rigidly constitutional gov- 
ernment must forever be, in some sense, pater- 
nal. It is not self-acting. It is not a mechan- 
ism in which, whether in its interpretation or 
its application, one is vv^holly without opportuni- 
ties for the exercise of a personal discretion; 
and, under its most strict construction, there 
may still breathe through it a personal note 
which is the courage, the equity, or the benevo- 
lence of its administrators. How urgent, then, 
the demand for a system in all our civil service 
by which the state shall be able to secure for 
herself her best sons, through whom her laws 
shall shine as the beacon lights to guide not 
alone those with wealth or influence, not alone 

235 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

the classes that are privileged or potent, bnt the 
least known or gifted or powerful among ns 
all! 

It is along these lines that the state calls for 
the intelligent service and cheerful self-sacri- 
fice of her best sons, with clearest and most 
imperious note. We are fond of quoting Mr. 
Gladstone's eulogium that our constitution is 
the most admirable thing of its kind that the 
art of man has devised. Mr. Gladstone so be- 
lieved because he conceived of it as doing its 
work under the guidance of wise hands, in- 
spired by the ballots of a free and enlightened 
people. But who are they in whose hands, with 
such precipitate generosity, we lodge this, 
which is, after all, the final and controlling 
power? Time was, and that not so long ago, 
when you here in this great commonwealth 
were, with the rest of us, substantially a homo- 
geneous people. Three great strains mingled, 
originally, in the founding of the republic— 
English, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, 
Dutch, and Huguenot ; and they were mutually 
stimulating and ennobling. But to-day I had 
almost said there are three hundred of them, 
some of them better and some of them worse, 

23G 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

but many of them, so far as their represen- 
tatives here are concerned, pregnant with evil 
and mischief to the peace of the state and the 
pnrity of onr institutions. And he who be- 
lieves in the state as a part of the divine 
ordering for the well-being of society must 
recognize that, in view of such dangers, to safe- 
guard its traditions and elevate its official life 
is one of his most brave and imperious obli- 
gations. 

For to lift this whole subject to its highest 
plane, the state in its largest and loftiest as- 
pects, stands with us to-day for the final im- 
pression of our American civilization. Do we 
appreciate the reach of these words? We set 
out originally upon our forward march as a 
republic with a theory of the measure of its 
responsibilities which was wholly local and lim- 
ited. The essence of the Monroe Doctrine was 
that, as far as practicable, we were to isolate 
ourselves from other lands and peoples, and to 
work out our own destinies upon our own soil, 
and under our own skies. Territorial or im- 
perial expansion had, it must be owned, no 
place in the dreams of the founders of the re- 
public, nor in the organic conceptions of our 

237 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

earliest and, as many of us believe, onr 
greatest statesmen. There were reasons 
for such, a position in the situation, as 
it then existed, which were natural enough; 
and which cannot, all of them at any rate, 
be exalted to that superior realm of mo- 
tive and character to which very often, the 
modern anti-imperialist has attempted to raise 
them. We were a weak people originally, and 
international alliances with other nations, most 
of them frankly hostile to our form of govern- 
ment, and vastly more powerful, more experi- 
enced, and more ambitious then than ourselves, 
might easily have issued in the loss of an in- 
dependence which had then only just been 
dearly won. And, even if this had been other- 
wise, we were mainly in possession of a vast 
continent which was large enough and vari- 
ous enough in its many opportunities and re- 
sources for the most exaggerated ambition. 
Our safety greatly lay, in other words, in mind- 
ing our own business, and in staying at home 
to do it. 

And if the conditions in this land had re- 
mained what they were a hundred years ago, 
the same policy would doubtless seem as wise 

238 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

to-day as it did then. I have no smallest inten- 
tion, let me say, of undertaking the advocacy 
of a different policy, concerning which there is 
no doubt much to be said that, if it does not 
discredit it, clouds its wisdom with the shadow 
of considerable and very grave uncertainties. 
But I am referring to our situation to-day as 
one in which, like the ordinance of marriage, 
we have entered upon certain relations for 
better or for worse, and in connection with 
which there have come to the state, in the wid- 
est significance of that term, great and grave 
responsibilities. To bemoan the blunder that 
assumed them, to berate the individuals or the 
policy that may have been responsible for that 
blunder, is about as wise as the act of a com- 
mander on the bridge whose steamer having 
been run into a network of menacing rocks 
and shoals, is abusing the pilot instead of help- 
ing him to find his way through them. The 
situation, in many respects of it, is a wholly 
novel one. A wise statesmanship, a just re- 
cognition of high responsibility, will best serve 
God and the country by seeking to find its way 
honorably and helpfully to meet and discharge 
that responsibility. 

239 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

And this is the more urgent because the ex- 
tension of the area not only of onr national in- 
fluence but of our national sovereignty involves 
tasks and obligations of a wholly new charac- 
ter to wholly new peoples. It cannot be denied 
that a large part of what I think I may not un- 
justly describe as a policy of aggressive impe- 
rialism is also a policy of aggressive commer- 
cialism. The ^^ market" is to the minds of a 
great multitude of people among; us the word, 
to-day, of the most magic import. What can 
we buy more cheaply in the Hawaiian or Phil- 
ippine Islands than anywhere else, and what 
can we sell more dearly there ? These, and not 
other and more serious questions which ought 
to concern a Christian people, are the impor- 
tunate interrogations of the hour. 

It need not concern us here to answer them ; 
but it ought to concern us to recognize what 
may be involved in a merely sordid and greedy 
answer to them. ^ ^ It is scarcely possible, ' ' says 
Mr. J. A. Hobson, whose admirable volume, if 
I have not already called your attention to it, 
I desire to commend to your thoughtful consid- 
eration ^—'^ It is scarcely possible for any one 

1 "The Social Problem/' J. A. Hobson; p. 273 et seq. 
240 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

pretending to form a rational conception of 
life to maintain that the rule of brute force 
maintained in the phrase homo homini lupus, 
though no longer applicable to individuals, 
still holds of nations. But if it does not hold, 
some standard of human utility must take its 
place. How slow has been the dawning of 
any rational conception of humanity, or of any 
feeling of a need of it, is testified by the 
current reluctance of statesmen and publicists 
to confront this issue. Yet many dim signs of 
its recognition are discernible. Not only Eng- 
land and America, but nations with a somewhat 
less developed standard of political morality, 
like Germany and Russia, are no longer con- 
tent to justify their territorial aggression and 
their interferences with foreign nationalities, 
on the grounds of mere selfish expediency ; but 
profess a certain mission of civilization, insist- 
ing, at any rate, that the attainment of their 
private ends is accompanied by a gain to the 
world, and, in particular, to the land or nation 
which is the object of the encroachment. The 
British conquest of India, the Russian advance 
in Central Asia, the opening up of China by the 
leading European nations, the partition of Af- 

241 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

rica into ^spheres of influence,' though mo- 
tived undeniably in the first instance by the 
particular commercial or political interests of 
great ^powers/ are defended also on the ground 
that, by spreading ^civilization' they make for 
the general welfare of the world. 

*^Now beyond pointing out a suspicious re- 
semblance which this line of reasoning bears 
to the exploded argument of the old economists, 
that an 'unseen hand' guides the enlightened 
selfishness of individual economic men to make 
for the greatest good of the community, we are 
not here concerned with the merits of these 
particular movements. AVhat does concern us 
is the testimony which the history of modern 
national movements bears to the need of a sci- 
entific sociology. ... It no longer suffices for 
each nation to claim to be its own arbiter as to 
the part it shall play in civilizing the world, 
and as to the spheres of political, industrial, 
and moral influence over which it seeks to oper- 
ate. The mere ipse dixit of a nation which 
professes a mission to annex some portion of 
the globe, and to break it in for the civilization 
of Christendom, will have little weight in any 
rational consideration of a world economy. On 

242 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

the other hand, a rigid conservation of existing 
territorial boundaries is neither historically 
feasible nor desirable. The utilization of the 
natural resources of each portion of the globe 
should be assigned to the people which can 
most effectively undertake it. This test, it 
is true, is eagerly accepted by every aggres- 
sive power, which adduces its very power of 
conquest as best evidence of the superior effi- 
ciency required. So we hear of the ^more 
efficient' and the 4ess efficient' races; and it 
is suggested that it is Hhe destiny,' or even 
^the mission,' of the former to ^wipe out' the 
latter, or to subjugate them. But two fallacies 
plainly underlie this argument. In the first 
place, efficiency, for the purpose in hand, is 
not attested by capacity of conquest, or even 
by superiority in the present arts of industry. 
Take the nations of Western Europe by their 
own valuation, and the whole earth is theirs, 
by indefeasible right, for the purposes of indus- 
trial exploitation, and for such political control 
as is essential to secure this object. Such a 
course is good for the conqueror, good for the 
conquered, good for everybody ! 

''But sociology, even in its dim beginnings, 
243 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

condemns the fallacious simplicity of such a 
solution. It finds ^efficiency' a relative term. 
The ^fittest' individual in some primitive so- 
ciety might be the man who, by force or cun- 
ning, was most successful in knocking his fel- 
lows on the head and taking their property. 
That form of ^fitness' has, however, in most 
societies yielded place to quite different forms. 
So, in the society of nations, we cannot con- 
clude that a nation is absolutely more fit and 
efficient because it is stronger in war or more 
advanced in certain arts of industry. Such 
^fitnesses' may not be the best tests of a nation's 
ability to ^civilize' another or to develop its 
material resources; and to turn the world into 
a cock-pit for the application of these tests may 
not be a wise economy of the material and moral 
powers of humanity. ' ' 

In other words, when a nation is stretching 
out its hand to grasp more territory, alien races, 
distant civilizations, or opportunities for the ex- 
tension of its own, the first question must needs 
be. What is its competency to discharge any 
such responsibility or to administer any such 
trust? What has it achieved, of its own, which 

244 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

warrants it in saying even to some savage tribe, 
^^The end of life is happiness,— physical, men- 
tal, and social well-being. You shall have su- 
perimposed upon you our ways, our laws, our 
modes of life, and, most of all, upon the vast 
majority of you, our tasks, and all that they in- 
volve"? There is an answer to that question 
in the language of a recent traveller among such 
tribes, which is, just here, perhaps not alto- 
gether impertinent: ^^I have visited,'' says 
Mr. Bryden,^ ^^ nearly every native town of 
consequence in Bechuanaland, and I say un- 
hesitatingly that the people are at this moment, 
physically and morally, far better off than 
many thousands of the populations of our great 
cities in Great Britain, living happier and 
healthier lives by far than seven-tenths of our 
poor folk at home.'' 

Is this to demonstrate that, after all, a Chris- 
tian civilization and the wise oversight and in- 
fluence of a great Christian state have nothing 
to contribute to pagan lands and peoples? 
Most surely not; but it is to indicate that, as 
yet, its own standards, moral, social, industrial, 

1 ^^ Gun and Camera in South Africa," by A. Bryden, ;P. 129. 

245 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

are sorely below a worthy level, sorely below 
the level of either honorable or adequate 
achievement. 

And so we see our calling as individuals, as 
citizens, as the children of a great republic. 
Authority needs to be reerected in the heart of 
the individual, in the counsels of corporations, 
before the eyes of the nation. We speak of the 
powers and responsibilities of the great states 
of Europe— Eussia, Germany, Great Britain, 
and the rest. But to-day the world owns that 
neither powers nor responsibilities such as 
these are, after all, a match for ours. How shall 
we use our strength? How shall we learn our 
obligations ? How, most of all, in this great and 
seething and aggressive industrial life of ours, 
shall we do our duty to our fellow-man, to our 
weaker fellow-man, to toilers and sufferers, 
under ground, in mills and factories and sweat- 
shops, and so make ours a state meet to lead 
and to rule, whether at home or abroad? To 
that question there is one answer, and only one. 
We must not only affirm the brotherhood of 
man : we must live it. For then the state, and, 
in the state, the home, the church, and the indi- 
vidual, shall become the incarnation of a regen- 

246 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

erated humanity, and earth, this earth, our 
earth, here and to-day, the vestibule of heaven ! 
And now my task is done. I would that the 
doing of it had been half so interesting to 
you as it has been to me. As, evening after 
evening, during these two weeks, I have found 
myself looking into your faces, I have be- 
lieved that I saw in them the evidences of 
a sincere and increasing interest in the great 
and grave themes with which we have been con- 
cerned. With all my heart, I pray that I may 
not have been mistaken ! You know better than 
I, for you are in closer touch than I to the ex- 
perience which long ago taught me how easy 
it is to welcome, intellectually, views and sug- 
gestions which the mind may take, after all, 
only as the eye takes in a bit of vivid color or 
the movement of a waving banner. That ban- 
ner may be the flag of one's country, and the 
color that imperishable crimson with which the 
blood of its dead heroes has dyed it; and yet 
it may do no more, as we watch it, than kindle 
an emotion or give a gentle fillip to a torpid 
and sentimental patriotism. And so of great 
ideas, the images of great duties, the prophecy, 
as they ought to be, of great service. Said the 

247 ■ / 



THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION 

founder of these lectures when last I saw him : 
^^Will you say to those young men that the 
foundation has been created to produce, if it 
may, not so much speculation as interest, not 
so much dialectic cleverness, as downright 
work. The times are waiting for men who shall 
serve, and not merely enquire; strive, and not 
merely investigate ; give to their age and their 
kind, not so much learning in bulk as wisdom 
in action ; great doing as the only true fruitage 
of great thinking; the consecration to the up- 
lifting of one's fellow-men of one's best, rather 
than the conserving, by mere culture, of one's 
self."/ I deliver his message, my brothers, as 
he has sent it to you. The thought behind it, 
though the poor words that utter it are mine, 
is all his own; and, though he will not thank 
me for saying so, it comes from one of those 
who have lived and wrought— even as they 
long, to-day, to see the young manhood of 
America, and preeminently of this great uni- 
versity, live and strive and serve— for God, for 
right, and so for all human kind. 



248 



OCT 29 1902 



